http - How to pass basic auth credentials in API call for a Flutter mobile application?

Question

I'm working on a simple Flutter mobile app that needs to call out to an API that uses Basic Auth.

I can hit the API in Postman using email & password credentials and it encodes the email & password in Base64 (I assume with a ":" separating) before performing the request.

I'm not sure how to do this in Flutter / Dart...

I've tinkered with the http package and tried to do the Base64 encoding... but I just get back errors from the server.

Can anyone provide some guidance or an example for a basic auth request?

Answer 1

Assuming that your server expects that the username:password combo will be encode it UTF-8 (see RFC 7617 for more details) then use this:

import 'dart:convert';
    
import 'package:http/http.dart';
    
main() async {
  String username = 'test';
  String password = '123￡';
  String basicAuth =
      'Basic ' + base64Encode(utf8.encode('$username:$password'));
  print(basicAuth);
    
  Response r = await get('https://api.somewhere.io',
      headers: <String, String>{'authorization': basicAuth});
  print(r.statusCode);
  print(r.body);
}