How to stimulate cURL request to a request using postman

Question

I am using the following cURL request to localhost which runs fine:

curl -u admin:e4d4face52f2e3dc22b43b2145ed7c58ce66e26b384d73592c -d "{\"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"feed.list\", \"id\": 1}" http://localhost/minifluxR/jsonrpc.php

But when I send the same request using Postman instead of cURL, I am getting:

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":null,"error":{"code":-32700,"message":"Parse error"}}

In Postman I used a GET request and sent the following as headers:

url:http://localhost/minifluxR/jsonrpc.php
username:admin
api_token:e4d4face52f2e3dc22b43b2145ed7c58ce66e26b384d73592c
method: feed.list

The following is the PHP function I am trying to trigger:

$server = new Server;

$server->authentication(array(
    \Model\Config\get('username') => \Model\Config\get('api_token')
));

// Get all feeds
$server->register('feed.list', function () {
    return Model\Feed\get_all();
});

Please help me to correct these errors.

Answer 1

When using cURL, the -u option (or --user) is used to supply the credentials for HTTP Basic authentication. This sets the Authorization header to contain the necessary data to authenticate with the server.

_{^{These steps apply to Postman's packaged app. For steps for the legacy app, view this of revision this answer.}}

To use HTTP Basic authentication as you were in your cURL command, click the Authorization tab and enter your credentials. Clicking Update Request will add the necessary Authorization header for you.

---

---

---

To submit the JSON data in the same way that you did with cURL, use a POST request, select raw under the Body tab, and enter your data like so:

---

---

To debug this I used Fiddler - a free web debugging proxy.

I used cURL's --proxy option to make it send its requests through Fiddler like so:

curl \
--proxy http://localhost:8888 \
-u foo:bar \
-d "{\"jsonrpc\": \"2.0\", \"method\": \"feed.list\", \"id\": 1}" \
http://localhost

Now that the request goes through Fiddler, I can select it from the session list, and use the "raw" inspector to see the raw request:

---

---

This shows me that the cURL is making a POST request with HTTP Basic authentication and application/x-www-form-urlencoded content. This type of data normally consists of keys and values, such as foo=bar&hoge=fuga. However, this cURL request is submitting a key without a value. A call to var_dump($_POST) will yield the following:

---

---

With a = at the end of the data (like so: {"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "feed.list", "id": 1}=) the var_dump will yield the following:

---

---

However, it seems that JsonRPC will use file_get_contents('php://input') in your case. This returns the data that was submitted with the request, including a =, if the data ends with it. Because it will try to parse the input data as a JSON string, it will fail if the string ends with a =, because that would be invalid JSON.

Using the FoxyProxy extension for Chrome, I created a proxy configuration for Fiddler (127.0.0.1:8888), which allowed me to easily debug the data being sent by Postman's POST request. Using x-www-form-urlencoded with a key of foo with no value, the data sent was actually foo=, which would result in your JSON string being invalid.

However, using "raw" input will allow for the specified data to be sent without a = being added to the end of it, thus ensuring the data is valid JSON.