Simon Willison’s Weblog

Instant authentication against an existing web application

I was thinking today about the problem of querying an existing authentication database from a new application—exactly the kind of thing web services are useful for. Then I realised that any web application protected by HTTP Basic authentication already provides a standard API against which queries can be run. Here’s the Python code to do exactly that:

def auth_against_url(url, username, password):
    import urllib2, base64
    request = urllib2.Request(url)
    b64 = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username, password))[:-1]
    request.add_header('Authorization', 'Basic %s' % b64)
    try:
        urllib2.urlopen(request)
    except urllib2.HTTPError:
        return False
    return True

To check a username and password against an existing application’s user database, just call the above function with the URL of a page within the existing application as the first argument. The function returns True if the username and password are valid, and False otherwise. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

A nice side effect of using Python’s standard library modules is that they transparently support HTTPS, so authentication can take place over an encrypted channel provided the target application supports it.