[powershell] Use Invoke-WebRequest with a username and password for basic authentication on the GitHub API

I am assuming Basic authentication here.

$cred = Get-Credential
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://whatever' -Credential $cred

You can get your credential through other means (Import-Clixml, etc.), but it does have to be a [PSCredential] object.

Edit based on comments:

GitHub is breaking RFC as they explain in the link you provided:

The API supports Basic Authentication as defined in RFC2617 with a few slight differences. The main difference is that the RFC requires unauthenticated requests to be answered with 401 Unauthorized responses. In many places, this would disclose the existence of user data. Instead, the GitHub API responds with 404 Not Found. This may cause problems for HTTP libraries that assume a 401 Unauthorized response. The solution is to manually craft the Authorization header.

Powershell's Invoke-WebRequest does to my knowledge wait for a 401 response before sending the credentials, and since GitHub never provides one, your credentials will never be sent.

Manually build the headers

Instead you'll have to create the basic auth headers yourself.

Basic authentication takes a string that consists of the username and password separated by a colon user:pass and then sends the Base64 encoded result of that.

Code like this should work:

$user = 'user'
$pass = 'pass'

$pair = "$($user):$($pass)"

$encodedCreds = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes($pair))

$basicAuthValue = "Basic $encodedCreds"

$Headers = @{
    Authorization = $basicAuthValue
}

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://whatever' -Headers $Headers

You could combine some of the string concatenation but I wanted to break it out to make it clearer.

Examples related to powershell

Why powershell does not run Angular commands? How do I install the Nuget provider for PowerShell on a unconnected machine so I can install a nuget package from the PS command line? How to print environment variables to the console in PowerShell? Check if a string is not NULL or EMPTY The term 'ng' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet VSCode Change Default Terminal 'Connect-MsolService' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet Powershell Invoke-WebRequest Fails with SSL/TLS Secure Channel Install-Module : The term 'Install-Module' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet Change directory in PowerShell

Examples related to github-api

Use Invoke-WebRequest with a username and password for basic authentication on the GitHub API How can I see the size of a GitHub repository before cloning it? Git cli: get user info from username

Examples related to basic-authentication

Use Invoke-WebRequest with a username and password for basic authentication on the GitHub API How to define the basic HTTP authentication using cURL correctly? Spring Security exclude url patterns in security annotation configurartion Basic HTTP and Bearer Token Authentication HTTP Error 401.2 - Unauthorized You are not authorized to view this page due to invalid authentication headers Calling a rest api with username and password - how to What is the "realm" in basic authentication How to prevent browser to invoke basic auth popup and handle 401 error using Jquery? Proxy Basic Authentication in C#: HTTP 407 error What is the difference between Digest and Basic Authentication?