Make an HTTP Request to an Address Protected by HTTP Basic Authentication

There are a number of tutorials using LWP and credentials, but none of those worked for me-- additionally I had no idea what the realm was (the server never sent it!).

It's possible to modify the request using authorization_basic which does not require a realm. This is what I used successfully.

Fiddler2, which can sniff packets from IE or Google Chrome, was invaluable here.

This is the code:

use HTTP::Request::Common;
use HTTP::Headers;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use LWP::Debug qw(+); #get the most logging available
  my $username = 'usernamehere';
  my $password = 'passwordhere';
  my $host = 'blah.blha.com';
  my %cookies = ();
    
  my $path = '/path/to/your/page';
  
  printf("Creating User Agent\n");
  my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
  $browser->cookie_jar( {} );
  
  printf("Creating Request\n");  
  my $request = HTTP::Request->new(GET => '$host$path');
  printf("Add auth data\n");  
  $request->authorization_basic($username, $password);
  
  printf("Sending Request\n");
  my $response = $browser->request($request);

  die "Error: ", $response->header('WWW-Authenticate') || 
    'Error accessing',
    #  ('WWW-Authenticate' is the realm-name)
    "\n ", $response->status_line, "\n at $url\n Aborting"
   unless $response->is_success;

One other note. The syntax for the other types of requests can get a bid unwieldy. A list of key=value pairs is straightforward:

$ua->request(POST 'http://somewhere/foo', [foo => bar, bar => foo]);

But what about sending XML? I created the following if statement for a request wrapper.

  if($method eq 'GET') {
    $request = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);
  } else {
    $request = HTTP::Request->new($method => $url);
    $request->content_type( 'application/xml' );
    $request->content( $body );
  }