Java HttpConnection refused, but curl equivalent works

Question

I'm losing my mind on this one. My curl command works:

curl http://testuser:testpwd@qabox3:8501/xmlcontroller

But, when I try what looks like an equivalent http connection in Java it gives "connection refused". What am I missing? I've tried a dozen flavors of trying to make this connection today and am out of ideas.

        URL url = new URL( "http://qabox3:8051/xmlcontroller" );
        HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
        conn.setRequestMethod( "GET" );
        String encoding = new sun.misc.BASE64Encoder().encode( "testuser:testpwd".getBytes() );
        conn.setRequestProperty("Authorization", "Basic " + encoding );
        InputStream content = conn.getInputStream();  // <--- fails here every time.
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader( content ) );
        String line;
        while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {
            System.out.println( line );
        }

Moreover, I can use Java's Runtime.exec() to exec the curl command and that still works...so I'm clearly doing something wrong in the HttpURLConnection stuff.

Here's the stack I'm seeing (now using HttpClient, but basically same stack with the Java libs).

Exception in thread "main" java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:333)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:195)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:182)
at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:366)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:520)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:470)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:367)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:240)
at org.apache.commons.httpclient.protocol.DefaultProtocolSocketFactory.createSocket(DefaultProtocolSocketFactory.java:80)
at org.apache.commons.httpclient.protocol.DefaultProtocolSocketFactory.createSocket(DefaultProtocolSocketFactory.java:122)
at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpConnection.open(HttpConnection.java:707)
at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector.executeWithRetry(HttpMethodDirector.java:387)
at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector.executeMethod(HttpMethodDirector.java:171)
at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient.executeMethod(HttpClient.java:397)
at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient.executeMethod(HttpClient.java:323)
at MyClass.sendRequest(iQ411RequestHandlerProxy.java:277)

Just for fun, here's the curl verbose output. Nothing special in the header...

> GET /xmlcontroller HTTP/1.1
> Authorization: Basic cWFfc3VwZXI6cWFfc3VwZXI=
> User-Agent: curl/7.16.3 (i686-pc-cygwin) libcurl/7.16.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8k zlib/1.2.3 libssh2/0.15-CVS
> Host: qabox3:8501
> Accept: */*
>

Answer 1

Take a look at HttpClient. It supports various authentication schemes without you having to resort to manually encoding / specifying headers.

Answer 2

Hi chriskes

You seem to use two different port numbers: 8501 and 8051? Could that be the problem or was that a typo in posting the question?

curl http://testuser:testpwd@qabox3:8501/xmlcontroller

URL url = new URL( "http://qabox3:8051/xmlcontroller" );

Regards, Ian

Answer 3

Could this be an HTTP proxy issue? Could curl be using your HTTP proxy and your Java app be trying to connect directly?

Answer 4

In your code example you never call conn.connect(). The openConnection() calls creates the URLConnection object but you need to actually call the connect method before interacting with the connection.