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We publish frequent updates to our documentation, and translation of this page may still be in progress. For the most current information, please visit the English documentation.
GitHub AE is currently under limited release.
 

 

Other authentication methods

You can use basic authentication for testing in a non-production environment.

To authenticate we recommend using OAuth tokens, such a personal access token through the OAuth web flow.

Basic Authentication

The API supports Basic Authentication as defined in RFC2617 with a few slight differences. The main difference is that the RFC requires unauthenticated requests to be answered with 401 Unauthorized responses. In many places, this would disclose the existence of user data. Instead, the GitHub AE API responds with 404 Not Found. This may cause problems for HTTP libraries that assume a 401 Unauthorized response. The solution is to manually craft the Authorization header.

Via personal access tokens

We recommend you use personal access tokens to authenticate to the GitHub API.

$ curl -u USERNAME:TOKEN https://HOSTNAME/api/v3/user

This approach is useful if your tools only support Basic Authentication but you want to take advantage of personal access token security features.