Embedding User + Password data for HTTP Basic Access Authentication in Querystring

Question

We're trying to test an API that requires HTTP Basic Access Authentication credentials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication) in the request.

Ideally, we could just test the API using a web browser by putting all API parameters in the URL querystring, but we haven't yet found a way to encode the HTTP Basic Access Authentication credentials (username and password) in the querystring.

Does anyone know a way to do this?

Thus far, we've tried:

https://username:[email protected]/

...without success.

Answer 1

username:password@url authentication has been disabled in many browsers for security reasons.

For example in IE:

• Internet Explorer does not support user names and passwords in Web site addresses (HTTP or HTTPS URLs)

As far as I know, there is no way to circumvent this if this is blocked. It's possible that this can be turned of in Firefox using a setting in about:config. Or use some other browser that doesn't block it - I don't know which ones do and which don't.

Alternatively, consider building a quick web form that submits the option to a server-side language (e.g. PHP) that makes the request, or use a command line client like wget to send the requests. The latter might even be easiest