Basic Auth Generator

The API wants basic authentication and your curl call needs the header ready. You try to build it by hand by piping user:pass into base64, forget the -n flag, a newline sneaks into the encoded value, and the server answers 401 without explaining anything. Or the password has an accent, the terminal encodes it as latin-1, and you spend twenty minutes blaming the credential.

The format is literally username, colon, password, all of it base64 encoded. The detail that trips people up by hand: the text has to become UTF-8 bytes before encoding, and the browser btoa function alone throws on accented characters. Here the conversion happens first, so a password with a cedilla comes out right. Since the colon is the separator, the username cannot contain one; the password can.

Base64 is not encryption. Anyone who sees the header decodes it in a second, so basic auth only makes sense over HTTPS, and never as credentials embedded in a URL before the at sign, which leak into shell history and proxy logs. The password box on this page shows plain text, so avoid generating production credentials while screen sharing. Everything is computed in the browser, with nothing sent to a server.