ArangoDB authentication and databases

Question

I am using the HTTP API for ArangoDB 2.6 (but I believe I encountered the problem I am about to describe in previous versions as well).

1. I authenticate with ArangoDB with user/passwd (root or an existing user).
2. I create a new database with the same user/passwd.
3. When I try to access the newly created database with the same user/passwd, I get a 401 (Unauthorized).

When I try to use the web dashboard instead I run into a similar problem where I get kicked back to the login screen and can't log in anymore when I try to access a database page. Am I doing something wrong? Could this be a bug? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The following seems to work in 2.6 with authentication turned on. It uses the HTTP REST API with curl:

First of all, we need to verify that we can actually connect to the _system database with a privileged user. We need this in order to create a new database:

curl --dump - --basic --user "root:rootpasswd" -X GET \
  http://127.0.0.1:8529/_db/_system/_api/version && echo

This should return an HTTP 200. Now that we can connect to the _system database, we can issue a call to create a new database, named "testdb". We'll create a user named "testuser" and password "test1234" to connect to it:

curl --dump - --basic --user "root:rootpasswd" -X POST \
  http://127.0.0.1:8529/_db/_system/_api/database \
  --data '{"name":"testdb","users":[{"username":"testuser","passwd":"test1234"}]}' && echo

This should have returned an HTTP 201.

Now we can finally check that we can actually connect to the just created database with the new user:

curl --dump - --basic --user "testuser:test1234" -X GET \
  http://127.0.0.1:8529/_db/testdb/_api/version && echo

This should return HTTP 200 as well, meaning that you can connect to the just created database with the new user.

Please check whether this works for you, too.