Use basic authentication with jQuery and Ajax

Question

I am trying to create a basic authentication through the browser, but I can't really get there.

If this script won't be here the browser authentication will take over, but I want to tell the browser that the user is about to make the authentication.

The address should be something like:

http://username:[email protected]/

I have a form:

<form name="cookieform" id="login" method="post">
      <input type="text" name="username" id="username" class="text"/>
      <input type="password" name="password" id="password" class="text"/>
      <input type="submit" name="sub" value="Submit" class="page"/>
</form>

And a script:

var username = $("input#username").val();
var password = $("input#password").val();

function make_base_auth(user, password) {
  var tok = user + ':' + password;
  var hash = Base64.encode(tok);
  return "Basic " + hash;
}
$.ajax
  ({
    type: "GET",
    url: "index1.php",
    dataType: 'json',
    async: false,
    data: '{"username": "' + username + '", "password" : "' + password + '"}',
    success: function (){
    alert('Thanks for your comment!');
    }
});

Solution 1

Use jQuery's beforeSend callback to add an HTTP header with the authentication information:

beforeSend: function (xhr) {
    xhr.setRequestHeader ("Authorization", "Basic " + btoa(username + ":" + password));
},

Solution 2

How things change in a year. In addition to the header attribute in place of xhr.setRequestHeader, current jQuery (1.7.2+) includes a username and password attribute with the $.ajax call.

$.ajax
({
  type: "GET",
  url: "index1.php",
  dataType: 'json',
  username: username,
  password: password,
  data: '{ "comment" }',
  success: function (){
    alert('Thanks for your comment!'); 
  }
});

EDIT from comments and other answers: To be clear - in order to preemptively send authentication without a 401 Unauthorized response, instead of setRequestHeader (pre -1.7) use 'headers':

$.ajax
({
  type: "GET",
  url: "index1.php",
  dataType: 'json',
  headers: {
    "Authorization": "Basic " + btoa(USERNAME + ":" + PASSWORD)
  },
  data: '{ "comment" }',
  success: function (){
    alert('Thanks for your comment!'); 
  }
});

Solution 3

Use the beforeSend callback to add a HTTP header with the authentication information like so:

var username = $("input#username").val();
var password = $("input#password").val();  

function make_base_auth(user, password) {
  var tok = user + ':' + password;
  var hash = btoa(tok);
  return "Basic " + hash;
}
$.ajax
  ({
    type: "GET",
    url: "index1.php",
    dataType: 'json',
    async: false,
    data: '{}',
    beforeSend: function (xhr){ 
        xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', make_base_auth(username, password)); 
    },
    success: function (){
        alert('Thanks for your comment!'); 
    }
});

Solution 4

Or, simply use the headers property introduced in 1.5:

headers: {"Authorization": "Basic xxxx"}

Reference: jQuery Ajax API

Solution 5

The examples above are a bit confusing, and this is probably the best way:

$.ajaxSetup({
  headers: {
    'Authorization': "Basic " + btoa(USERNAME + ":" + PASSWORD)
  }
});

I took the above from a combination of Rico and Yossi's answer.

The btoa function Base64 encodes a string.

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