til/unix/authorize-a-curl-request.md

Authorize A cURL Request

When making a cURL request to an endpoint that requires authentication, sometimes you already have a bearer token and other times you have a username and password pair. If you have a bearer token, you can format a Authorization header with the -H flag that includes that value.

If you have a username and password for the API, you can instead use the -u flag. The -u flag will format the username and password, base64 encode it, and then add it as an Authorization header.

$ curl -v -u "username:password" https://some-endpoint.com/api/v1/status

...
> GET /api/v1/status HTTP/2
> Host: some-endpoint.com
> Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQK
> User-Agent: curl/8.1.2
...

You can even pass in only the username to the -u flag and cURL will know to prompt you for the password. This is a nice way to avoid putting plain text passwords in your shell history.

$ curl -v -u "username" https://some-endpoint.com/api/v1/status
Enter host password for user 'username':

See man curl for more details.