Httpie: How to use auth info from .netrc is not clear

[jclem]

The README says "Authorization information from .netrc is honored as well", but it's not clear how this is done. The README should be updated to explain this. I'd submit a PR, but I still can't figure it out. Not quite as easy as curl -n.

[jakubroztocil]

For now, HTTPie always tries to read the default ~/.netrc file (or ~/_netrc on windows). It's actually the underlying python-requests library that does that.

[jclem]

Hm...I have a ~/.netrc file that works perfectly well with curl, but seems to be completely ignored by HTTPie.

[jakubroztocil]

Here is a working example:

Without ~/.netrc:

$ http httpbin.org/basic-auth/httpie/test
HTTP/1.1 401 UNAUTHORIZED
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:49:10 GMT
Server: gunicorn/0.16.1
Www-Authenticate: Basic realm="Fake Realm"

Added this to ~/.netrc:

machine httpbin.org
login httpie
password test

And it's picked up:

$ http httpbin.org/basic-auth/httpie/test
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Length: 47
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:49:23 GMT
Server: gunicorn/0.16.1

{
    "authenticated": true, 
    "user": "httpie"
}

You can also set the --verbose flag to see if HTTPie sends Authorization: Basic xxxxxx.

[jakubroztocil]

Actually, you can run $ python -m netrc to see how your ~/.netrc is understood by he netrc module from Python's standard library.

[capncodewash]

I've opened a pull request to modify the readme with a short example of this.

[jclem]

Just to follow up, I had no value next to one of the login fields in my .netrc that seemed only to bother Python. curl for some reason did not have a problem with it.