How to send a correct authorization header for basic authentication

Question

I am trying to POST data from my API but I can't pass the basic authentication.

I try:

$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  url: http://EDUREKA.com/api/v1/method/,
  data: {},
  crossDomain: true,
  beforeSend: function(xhr) {
    xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 'Basic ZWx1c3VhcmlvOnlsYWNsYXZl');
  }
});

My server configuration response is:

response["Access-Control-Allow-Origin"] = "*"
response["Access-Control-Allow-Methods"] = "POST"
response["Access-Control-Max-Age"] = "1000"
response["Access-Control-Allow-Headers"] = "*"

The headers that I get is:

Request Headers

OPTIONS /api/v1/token-auth/ HTTP/1.1
Host: EDUREKA.com
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Request-Method: POST
Origin: http://127.0.0.1:8080
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.63 Safari/537.31
Access-Control-Request-Headers: origin, authorization, content-type
Accept: */*
Referer: http://127.0.0.1:8080/
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: es,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

Response header

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Server: nginx/1.1.19
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 01:29:21 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 597
Connection: keep-alive
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Restricted"

Any suggestions?

Niroj · Answer 1 · Aug 13, 2020

Hello @kartik,

Here is how to do Basic auth with a header instead of putting the username and password in the URL. Note that this still doesn't hide the username or password from anyone with access to the network or this JS code (e.g. a user executing it in a browser):

$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  url: http://EDUREKA.com/api/v1/method/,
  data: {},
  crossDomain: true,
  beforeSend: function(xhr) {
    xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 'Basic ' + btoa(unescape(encodeURIComponent(YOUR_USERNAME + ':' + YOUR_PASSWORD))))
  }
});

Hope this help!!
Thank You!