Authenticating to the interface

Using query parameters for authentication

You can submit your credentials with query parameters that you add to the URL in your logon request.

curl -i -X POST "$REST/login?userName=myusername&pass=mypassword"

Using an authentication header

You can also use the Basis Access Authentication method to authenticate, which requires that you submit your credentials in an authentication header.

curl -i -H "Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46d2ViZ2F0ZXdheQ==" -X POST "$REST/login"

In the authentication header, the string after Authorization: Basic is the Base64-encoded representation of your user name and password. 

Session ID

The session ID is sent to you in the response to your logon request. A session ID looks, for example, like this:
D0EFF1F50909466159728F28465CF763

It is either contained in the response body:
<entryxmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<contenttype="text">D0EFF1F50909466159728F28465CF763</content></entry>

or in a Set-Cookie header:
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=D0EFF1F50909466159728F28465CF763

In the requests of the sessions that follow the logon request, you must include the session ID as JSESSIONID.

For easier code writing and reading, you can set a variable to the value of the ID and use it for including the ID.

export SESSIONID=D0EFF1F50909466159728F28465CF763

You can append the ID as a matrix parameter to the URL, preceded by a semicolon.

curl -i "$REST/appliances;jsessionid=$SESSIONID"

Alternatively, you can send the ID in a Cookie header.

curl -i -H "Cookie: JSESSIONID=$SESSIONID" "$REST/appliances"

The -c option in curl allows you to collect all cookies in a text file, which is then sent with subsequent requests.

curl -i -c cookies.txt -H "Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46d2ViZ2F0ZXdheQ=="
-X POST "$REST/login"

For sending a cookie file with a request, the -b option is used:

curl -i -b cookies.txt "$REST/appliances"