AJAX and HTTP Basic Auth

Problem

Sometimes the access to a web page or resource should be protected. To accomplish the task use a HTTP authentication. The request for such a resource through the XmlHttpRequest interface or Fetch API may hurt user experience since an alert asking for user credentials will appear.

HTTP Authentication

HTTP Authentication provides mechanism to protect web pages and resources.

• Basic

  The browser sends the username and password as Base64-encoded text, without any encryption. Basic authentication should only be used with HTTPS, otherwise the password can be exposed to everyone.

  If the client request protected resource without providing credentials, the server will reject the request and send back 401 HTTP status and WWW-Authenticate header.

  HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
  WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Restricted area"
  

  Then the browser will display popup asking for user credentials used to retry the request with Authorization header.

  Authorization: Basic bXl1c2VyOm15cHN3ZA==
  

• Digest

  The client sends the hashed variant of the username and password. Encryption instead of encoding makes the digest authentication safer than basic auth.

Request

The solution is quite simple, an Authorization header sent with the request.

<script>
// using jQuery & 'beforeSend' callback
$.ajax({
    xhrFields: {
        withCredentials: true
    },
    beforeSend: function (xhr) {
        xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 'Basic ' + btoa('myuser:mypswd'));
    },
    url: "https://www.example.org/protected-data.php"
});

// using jQuery & 'headers' property
$.ajax({
    xhrFields: {
        withCredentials: true
    },
    headers: {
        'Authorization': 'Basic ' + btoa('myuser:mypswd')
    },
    url: "https://www.example.org/protected-data.php"
});

// using XMLHttpRequest
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("GET", "https://www.example.org/protected-data.php", true);
xhr.withCredentials = true;
xhr.setRequestHeader("Authorization", 'Basic ' + btoa('myuser:mypswd'));
xhr.onload = function () {
    console.log(xhr.responseText);
};
xhr.send();

// using Fetch API
var myHeaders = new Headers();
myHeaders.append("Authorization", 'Basic ' + btoa('myuser:mypswd'));
fetch("https://www.example.org/protected-data.php", {
    credentials: "include",
    headers: myHeaders
}).then(function (response) {
    return response.json();
}).then(function (json) {
    console.log(json);
});
</script>

jQuery API provides username and password parameters as part of the ajax settings object, which intends to do the job instead of sending a header by yourself, unfortunatelly they doesn't works.

Response

To trigger the basic authentication use your prefered method.

• PHP

  <?php
  if (!(isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'], $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']) 
      && $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] == 'myuser' 
      && $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] == 'mypswd')) {
      header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Restricted area"');
      header('HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized');
      exit;
  }
  ?>
  

• Apache

  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "Restricted area"
  AuthUserFile "/var/www/.htpasswd"
  Require valid-user
  

• Nginx

  auth_basic "Restricted area";
  auth_basic_user_file /var/www/.htpasswd;
  

htpasswd is used to create and update the flat-files used to store usernames and password for basic authentication of HTTP users.

htpasswd -c /var/www/.htpasswd myuser

Cross-Domain Requests with CORS

In case, the protected resource or page is accessible through a domain that differs from the origin, a restriction from same origin policy is applied. To circumvent the same-origin policy, use the Cross-origin resource sharing.

# Request Headers
Authorization: Basic bXl1c2VyOm15cHN3ZA==
Host: subdomain.example.org
Origin: https://www.example.org

# Response Headers
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin, Authorization
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://www.example.org
P3P:CP="CAO PSA OUR"

Demo

To see an example of ajax basic auth check out our demo.

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If you have questions about the ajax basic authentication, please leave a comment below. And do not be shy to share this article. Thanks so much for reading!