Using HTTP Basic-Auth with Google App Engine URLFetch service

Question

How can I specify the username and password for making Basic-Auth requests with App Engine's URLFetch service (in Java)?

It seems I can set HTTP headers:

URL url = new URL("http://www.example.com/comment");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setRequestProperty("X-MyApp-Version", "2.7.3");        

What are the appropriate headers for Basic-Auth?

Answer 1

This is a basic auth header over http:

Authorization: Basic base64 encoded(username:password)

eg:

GET /private/index.html HTTP/1.0
Host: myhost.com
Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==

You will need to do this:

URL url = new URL("http://www.example.com/comment");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setRequestProperty("Authorization",
"Basic "+codec.encodeBase64String(("username:password").getBytes());

And to do that you will want to get a base64 codec api, like the Apache Commons Codec