How to translate a CURL POST request into NodeRED

Question

I'm having problems translating the following CURL request into my NodeRED flow:

curl -X POST -u "apikey:my_api_key" -F "features=objects" -F "collection_ids=my_collection_ids" -F "image_url=my_image_URL" "API_url"

I created a function node and a HTTP request node (with the method set to POST and the URL set to "API_url").

In the function node I wrote the following code:

msg.headers = {}
msg.headers = {
    'content-type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    'apikey': 'my_api_key'
};

msg.payload = { }
msg.payload = { 
    'features': 'objects',
    'collection_ids': my_collection_ids',
    'image_url': my_image_URL'
};

return msg;

When I trigger the request, I get this error:

"{"code":401, "error": "Unauthorized"}"

am I doing a mistake passing the apikey in the header? any suggestions? thanks a lot in advance

Answer 1

The issue is with your authentication header.

When you pass -u username:pass to curl, it generates the appropriate Authorization header in the request which looks like:

Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzcw==

This has the username:pass part encoded using base64.

So for your case, you should do the following to set the header properly:

msg.headers = {
    'content-type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    'Authorization': 'Basic '+(new Buffer('apikey:my_api_key')).toString('base64')
};