Testing with Basic HTTP Authentication in Rails 2.0

January 11, 2008

I ran into a little issue while writing functional tests in Rails 2.0, using the included HTTP authentication I’d find my controllers returning 401 errors since they weren’t authenticated. After poking around, I found a solution:

class Test::Unit::TestCase
 	def http_auth
	 @request.env[”HTTP_AUTHORIZATION”] = “Basic #{Base64.encode64(”foo:bar”)}”
	end
end

Then, in my actual tests I could call:

http_auth

Viewing 7 Comments

Hugues Lamy 8 months ago 1 point
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Thanks for the tip. You just saved me couple of hours of fighting with the tests.

Take Care.

Hugues

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http://m2i3.com

Jonathan 8 months ago 1 point
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Ce n'est pas un problème! (That's my year of Français I took coming out)

I definitely spent too much time trying to figure this out...it's the simple things that are always a pain!

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Diego 7 months ago 1 point
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Thanks! Finally made my tests work..

Regards

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Jonathan 7 months ago 1 point
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It's always kind of cool when random people read your blog and you can help them :)

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Lane 6 months ago 1 point
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Ahh, yes! I've been looking for this too. Thanks!

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http://bonesisalive.com

robert 4 months ago 1 point
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thanks for this. helped in our functional tests of our REST services using http basic auth.

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Ryan Cannon 2 months ago 1 point
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A few months late, I found this via the Google. A couple notes:

In case you're unfamiliar with testing Rails, this goes in test/test_helper.rb

The function above doesn't actually let you test HTTP Authentication. To do that you'll need to do something like:

def authenticate_with_http(username, password)
@request.env[”HTTP_AUTHORIZATION”] =
"Basic #{Base64.encode64("#{username}:#{password}")}"
end

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http://ryancannon.com/