ECS 3.6.2 Data Access Guide

Authenticate without cookies

The following example shows how to use authentication tokens by reading the X-SDS-AUTH-TOKEN HTTP header from a successful authentication request and copying that header into a subsequent request. This example does not use cookies. The examples are written using the curl command line tool and formatted for readability.

The following ECS API call executes a GET on the /login resource. The -u option specifies the user of the basic authentication header. You must specify the user in the request. Upon successful authentication, the ECS API returns a HTTP 200 code and the X-SDS-AUTH-TOKEN header containing the encoded token.

The default ECS API token lifetime is 8 hours, which means that after 8 hours the token is no longer valid. The default idle time for a token is two hours; after a two hour idle time, the token expires. If you use an expired token, you are redirected to the /login URL. You will receive an HTTP status error code 401 upon any subsequent use of the expired token.

curl -L --location-trusted -k https://10.247.100.247:4443/login -u "root:ChangeMe" -v

> GET /login HTTP/1.1
> Authorization: Basic cm9vdDpDaGFuZ2VNZQ==
> User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 (i386-pc-win32) libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8t zlib/1.2.5
> Host: 10.247.100.247:4443
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 22:18:25 GMT
< Content-Type: application/xml
< Content-Length: 93
< Connection: keep-alive
< X-SDS-AUTH-TOKEN: BAAcQ0xOd3g0MjRCUG4zT3NJdnNuMlAvQTFYblNrPQMAUAQADTEzODU0OTQ4NzYzNTICAAEABQA5dXJu
                    OnN0b3JhZ2VvczpUb2tlbjo2MjIxOTcyZS01NGUyLTRmNWQtYWZjOC1kMGE3ZDJmZDU3MmU6AgAC0A8=
<
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<loggedIn>
   <user>root</user>
</loggedIn>
* Connection #0 to host 10.247.100.247 left intact
* Closing connection #0
* SSLv3, TLS alert, Client hello (1):

You can copy the X-SDS-AUTH-TOKEN contents and pass it into the next API call through the curl tool -H switch, as shown in the following example.

curl https://10.247.100.247:4443/object/namespaces
     -k 
     -H "X-SDS-AUTH-TOKEN: BAAcOHZLaGF4MTl3eFhpY0czZ0tWUGhJV2xreUE4PQMAUAQADTEzODU0OTQ4NzYzNTICAAEABQA5dXJu
                           OnN0b3JhZ2VvczpUb2tlbjpkYzc3ODU3Mi04NWRmLTQ2YjMtYjgwZi05YTdlNDFkY2QwZDg6AgAC0A8="

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> 
<namespaces>
   <namespace>
     <id>ns1</id>
     <link rel="self" href="/object/namespaces/namespace/ns1"/>
     <names>ns1</name>
   </namespace>
</namespaces>