How to send Basic Auth with axios

Question

I'm trying to implement the following code, but something is not working. Here is the code:

      var session_url = 'http://api_address/api/session_endpoint';
      var username = 'user';
      var password = 'password';
      var credentials = btoa(username + ':' + password);
      var basicAuth = 'Basic ' + credentials;
      axios.post(session_url, {
        headers: { 'Authorization': + basicAuth }
      }).then(function(response) {
        console.log('Authenticated');
      }).catch(function(error) {
        console.log('Error on Authentication');
      });

It's returning a 401 error. When I do it with Postman there is an option to set Basic Auth; if I don't fill those fields it also returns 401, but if I do, the request is successful.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Here is part of the docs of the API of how to implement this:

This service uses Basic Authentication information in the header to establish a user session. Credentials are validated against the Server. Using this web-service will create a session with the user credentials passed and return a JSESSIONID. This JSESSIONID can be used in the subsequent requests to make web-service calls.*

Answer 1

There is an "auth" parameter for Basic Auth:

auth: {
  username: 'janedoe',
  password: 's00pers3cret'
}

Source/Docs: https://github.com/mzabriskie/axios

Example:

await axios.post(session_url, {}, {
  auth: {
    username: uname,
    password: pass
  }
});

Answer 2

The reason the code in your question does not authenticate is because you are sending the auth in the data object, not in the config, which will put it in the headers. Per the axios docs, the request method alias for post is:

axios.post(url[, data[, config]])

Therefore, for your code to work, you need to send an empty object for data:

var session_url = 'http://api_address/api/session_endpoint';
var username = 'user';
var password = 'password';
var basicAuth = 'Basic ' + btoa(username + ':' + password);
axios.post(session_url, {}, {
  headers: { 'Authorization': + basicAuth }
}).then(function(response) {
  console.log('Authenticated');
}).catch(function(error) {
  console.log('Error on Authentication');
});

The same is true for using the auth parameter mentioned by @luschn. The following code is equivalent, but uses the auth parameter instead (and also passes an empty data object):

var session_url = 'http://api_address/api/session_endpoint';
var uname = 'user';
var pass = 'password';
axios.post(session_url, {}, {
  auth: {
    username: uname,
    password: pass
  }
}).then(function(response) {
  console.log('Authenticated');
}).catch(function(error) {
  console.log('Error on Authentication');
});