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

Question

With cURL  we can pass a username with an HTTP web request as follows      curl -u  lt your username gt  https   api github com user   The -u flag accepts a username for authentication  and then cURL will request the password  The cURL example is for Basic authentication with the GitHub Api   How do we similarly pass a username and password along with Invoke-WebRequest  The ultimate goal is to user PowerShell with Basic authentication in the GitHub API

User · Answer

I know this is a little off the OPs original request but I came across this while looking for a way to use Invoke-WebRequest against a site requiring basic authentication.

The difference is, I did not want to record the password in the script. Instead, I wanted to prompt the script runner for credentials for the site.

Here's how I handled it

$creds = Get-Credential

$basicCreds = [pscredential]::new($Creds.UserName,$Creds.Password)

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $URL -Credential $basicCreds

The result is the script runner is prompted with a login dialog for the U/P then, Invoke-WebRequest is able to access the site with those credentials. This works because $Creds.Password is already an encrypted string.

I hope this helps someone looking for a similar solution to the above question but without saving the username or PW in the script

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

This is what worked for our particular situation    Notes are from Wikipedia on Basic Auth from the Client Side  Thank you to  briantist s answer for the help   Combine the username and password into a single string username password   user    shaunluttin   pass    super-strong-alpha-numeric-symbolic-long-password   pair      user    pass     Encode the string to the RFC2045-MIME variant of Base64  except not limited to 76 char line    bytes    System Text Encoding   ASCII GetBytes  pair   base64    System Convert   ToBase64String  bytes    Create the Auth value as the method  a space  and then the encoded pair Method Base64String   basicAuthValue    Basic  base64    Create the header Authorization  Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ     headers      Authorization    basicAuthValue     Invoke the web-request  Invoke-WebRequest -uri  https   api github com user  -Headers  headers   The PowerShell version of this is more verbose than the cURL version is  Why is that   briantist pointed out that GitHub is breaking the RFC and PowerShell is sticking to it  Does that mean that cURL is also breaking with the standard

User · Answer

Here is another way using WebRequest  I hope it will work for you  user    whatever   pass    whatever   secpasswd   ConvertTo-SecureString  pass -AsPlainText -Force  credential   New-Object System Management Automation PSCredential  user   secpasswd   headers      Authorization    quot Basic Zm9vOmJhcg   quot      Invoke-WebRequest -Credential  credential -Headers  headers -Uri  quot https   dc01 test local  quot

User · Answer

Use this     root    REST SERVICE URL   user    user   pass   password   secpasswd   ConvertTo-SecureString  pass -AsPlainText -Force  credential   New-Object System Management Automation PSCredential  user   secpasswd    result   Invoke-RestMethod  root -Credential  credential

User · Answer

If someone would need a one liner   iwr -Uri  https   api github com user  -Headers    Authorization    Basic     System Convert   ToBase64String  System Text Encoding   ASCII GetBytes  user pass

User · Answer

another way is to use certutil exe save your username and password in a file e g  in txt as username password  certutil -encode in txt out txt   Now you should be able to use auth value from out txt   headers      Authorization    Basic    get-content out txt  1      Invoke-WebRequest -Uri  https   whatever  -Headers  Headers

User · Answer

I had to do this to get it to work    pair       user     pass    encodedCredentials    System Convert   ToBase64String  System Text Encoding   ASCII GetBytes  Pair    headers      Authorization    Basic  encodedCredentials    Invoke-WebRequest -Uri  url -Method Get -Headers  headers -OutFile Config html

User · Answer

Invoke-WebRequest follows the RFC2617 as  briantist noted  however there are some systems  e g  JFrog Artifactory  that allow anonymous usage if the Authorization header is absent  but will respond with 401 Forbidden if the header contains invalid credentials   This can be used to trigger the 401 Forbidden response and get -Credentials to work    login   Get-Credential -Message  Enter Credentials for Artifactory                                  Basic foo bar  headers      Authorization    Basic Zm9vOmJhcg         Invoke-WebRequest -Credential  login -Headers  headers -Uri         This will send the invalid header the first time  which will be replaced with the valid credentials in the second request since -Credentials overrides the Authorization header   Tested with Powershell 5 1

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

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