Basic HTTP Auth in Go

Question

I'm trying to do basic HTTP auth with the code below, but it is throwing out the following error:

2013/05/21 10:22:58 Get mydomain.example: unsupported protocol scheme "" exit status 1

func basicAuth() string {
    var username string = "foo"
    var passwd string = "bar"
    client := &http.Client{}
    req, err := http.NewRequest("GET", "mydomain.example", nil)
    req.SetBasicAuth(username, passwd)
    resp, err := client.Do(req)
    if err != nil{
        log.Fatal(err)
    }
    bodyText, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    s := string(bodyText)
    return s
}

Any idea what I may be doing wrong?

score 111 · Answer 1 · edited May 07 '20 at 18:41

111

the potential 'gotcha' is if your website does any redirects... Go-lang will drop your specified headers on the redirects. (I had to do wireshark to see this! You can quicky find out in chrome by right-clicking then "inspect element" and click network tab)

you'll want to define a redirect function that adds the header back in.

func basicAuth(username, password string) string {
  auth := username + ":" + password
  return base64.StdEncoding.EncodeToString([]byte(auth))
}

func redirectPolicyFunc(req *http.Request, via []*http.Request) error{
  req.Header.Add("Authorization","Basic " + basicAuth("username1","password123"))
  return nil
}

func main() {
  client := &http.Client{
    Jar: cookieJar,
    CheckRedirect: redirectPolicyFunc,
  }

  req, err := http.NewRequest("GET", "http://localhost/", nil)
  req.Header.Add("Authorization","Basic " + basicAuth("username1","password123")) 
  resp, err := client.Do(req)
}

edited May 07 '20 at 18:41

nnyby

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answered Jul 09 '15 at 06:06

pmerrell

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59

Very useful tip - ran into the same problem myself. In the redirect function you can do a `req.SetBasicAuth("username1", "password123")` instead of setting the header itself. – mjturner Apr 17 '16 at 15:06
2

but be careful, if you know your endpoint does not do redirects this is not advised to implement security-wise – H.Molnar Oct 18 '19 at 09:08
4

Or you can `http.NewRequest("GET", "http://user:pass@localhost/", nil)` – Nikolay Dimitrov May 18 '20 at 02:39

score 68 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 17 '22 at 12:19

68

You need to specify the protocol for NewRequest, e.g. "http://", see here.

req, err := http.NewRequest("GET", "http://mydomain.example", nil)

edited Jun 17 '22 at 12:19

Stephen Ostermiller

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answered May 21 '13 at 15:33

Ryan

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Basic HTTP Auth in Go

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