How to do basic authentication over HTTPs in Ruby? - ruby

Question

After looking a lot, I've found some solutions that seem working, but not for me...
For example, I have this script:
require 'net/http'
require "net/https"
#http=Net::HTTP.new('www.xxxxxxx.net', 443)
#http.use_ssl = true
#http.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
#http.start() {|http|
req = Net::HTTP::Get.new('/gb/PastSetupsXLS.asp?SR=31,6')
req.basic_auth 'my_user', 'my_password'
response = http.request(req)
print response.body
}
When I run it, it gives me a page that requests for authentication, but if I write the following URL in the browser, I get into the website without problems:
https://my_user:my_password#www.xxxxxxx.net/gb/PastSetupsXLS.asp?SR=31,6
I have also tried with open-uri:
module OpenSSL
module SSL
remove_const :VERIFY_PEER
end
end
OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
def download(full_url, to_here)
writeOut = open(to_here, "wb")
writeOut.write(open(full_url, :http_basic_authentication=>["my_user", "my_password"]).read)
writeOut.close
end
download('https://www.xxxxxxx.net/gb/PastSetupsXLS.asp?SR=31,6', "target_file.html")
But the result is the same, the site is asking for user authentication.
Any tips of what am I doing wrong?. Must I encode the password in Base 64?

Answer 1

I wrote a piece of code based on examples given in the Net::HTTP docs and tested it on my local WAMP server - it works fine. Here's what I have:
require 'net/http'
require 'openssl'
uri = URI('https://localhost/')
Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port,
:use_ssl => uri.scheme == 'https',
:verify_mode => OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE) do |http|
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new uri.request_uri
request.basic_auth 'matt', 'secret'
response = http.request request # Net::HTTPResponse object
puts response
puts response.body
end
And my .htaccess file looks like this:
AuthName "Authorization required"
AuthUserFile c:/wamp/www/ssl/.htpasswd
AuthType basic
Require valid-user
My .htpasswd is just a one liner generated with htpasswd -c .htpasswd matt for password "secret". When I run my code I get "200 OK" and contents of index.html. If I remove the request.basic_auth line, I get 401 error.
UPDATE:
As indicated by #stereoscott in the comments, the :verify_mode value I used in the example (OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE) is not safe for production.
All available options listed in the OpenSSL::SSL::SSLContext docs are: VERIFY_NONE, VERIFY_PEER, VERIFY_CLIENT_ONCE, VERIFY_FAIL_IF_NO_PEER_CERT, out of which (according to the OpenSSL docs) only the first two ones are used in the client mode.
So VERIFY_PEER should be used on production, which is the default btw, so you can skip it entirely.

Answer 2

The following is what ended up working for me:
require "uri"
require "net/http"
url = URI("https://localhost/")
https = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
https.use_ssl = true
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(url)
request["Authorization"] = "Basic " + Base64::encode64("my_user:my_password")
response = https.request(request)
puts response.read_body
I came up with this by building a new HTTP Request in Postman, specifying the URL, choosing an Authorization Type of "Basic Auth," and inputting the credentials.
Clicking the Code icon (</>) and selecting "Ruby - Net::HTTP" will then generate a code snippet, giving you the output above.
Postman took care of encoding the credentials, but this answer helped me to dynamically set these values. You also can likely omit the "cookie" key as part of the request.