cannot use variables in [BasicAuth]

[andres-lowrie]

Hello, great tool!

Not sure if this is a bug or just a misunderstanding but I'm trying to use variables in the [BasicAuth] section and it looks like the tool doesn't like it:

_test.hurl

POST http://localhost
[BasicAuth]
{{user}}:{{pass}}

and then I call it like

hurl --variable user=bob --variable pass=secret test.hurl

and get back

error: Parsing JSON
  --> passforbasicauth.hurl:2:2
   |
 2 | [BasicAuth]
   |  ^ JSON error
   |

Is that supposed to work?

---

My use case is one where I want to be able to define the secrets in another file and not in the hurl file itself to make it easy to share it

[jcamiel]

Hi,

Unfortunately, you can't use this syntax for now.

If you want to not expose credentials in the Hurl file, you can do the following

1. use an Authorization header

POST http://localhost
Authorization: Basic {{digest}}

Where the variable digest have been computed like that:

$ hurl --variable digest=`echo -n 'bob:secret' | base64` test.hurl

Or you can also make a environment variable like this:

$ export HURL_digest=`echo -n 'bob:secret' | base64`
$ hurl test.hurl

In this case, any HURL_foo environment variable is injected as foovariable in the Hurl file.

2. use --user option but you will add a basic authentication header to all your requests.

We can think about how to improve things for basic authentication, because in most cases you don't want to write your credentials in a file,

[andres-lowrie]

fair enough. Thanks for looking into this!

[tpluscode]

I just tried the same and would also ask for variables to work in [BasicAuth].

My reasoning is that having credentials in a .env file in dev env and secrets in CI makes it easier to run hurl in both cases. Otherwise, the necessity to pass credentials from CLI is a little troublesome

[jcamiel]

Hi @tpluscode, @andres-lowrie,

This issue is now merged on master.
You can now write:

POST http://foo.com/login
[BasicAuth]
{{user}}: {{password}}
HTTP 200