Jakarta Commons Cookbook

11.10. Basic Authentication

Problem

You need to access information protected by HTTP Basic Authentication.

Solution

Create a UsernamePasswordCredentials object with a username and password. Add this Credentials object to the instance of HttpState associated with an HttpClient object. HttpClient will attempt to execute a message, and the server will respond with 401 response code; HttpClient will then retry the request with the appropriate Authorization header. The following example uses a UsernamePasswordCredentials object to access a protected resource:

               import org.apache.commons.httpclient.Credentials;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpException;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethod;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.UsernamePasswordCredentials;
import org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.GetMethod;

HttpClient client = new HttpClient( );
HttpState state = client.getState( );
    
// Set credentials on the client
Credentials credentials =
     new UsernamePasswordCredentials( "testuser", "crazypass" );
state.setCredentials( null, null, credentials );

String url = "http://www.discursive.com/jccook/auth/";
HttpMethod method = new GetMethod( url );
    
client.executeMethod( method );
String response = method.getResponseBodyAsString( );

System.out.println( response );
method.releaseConnection( );

This example executes a GetMethod, the server requests credentials, and the credentials are sent to the server. The final response ...