This is one of the oldest forms of HTTP authentication. In the context of an HTTP transaction, basic access authentication is a method for an HTTP user agent (e.g. a web browser) to provide a user name and password when making a request. In basic HTTP authentication, a request contains a header field in the form of Authorization: Basic <credentials>, where credentials is the Base64 encoding of ID and password joined by a single colon :.In the earliest days of the web this what would be part of seeing a little drop down at the top of a web page where you would need to enter a username and password into your browser.
How does it look?
Basically we have:
Authorization header
With the keyword Basic followed by the username:password but where the username and password are encoded in Base64.
This fragment of Lua code in the translator makes it more clear how this looks:
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See the Confluence API for an example of an API which uses this method of authentication.
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