What is Authentication?

Before you can call a pipeline or command from remote, you need to authenticate ("login") first. This can be done in different ways depending on your requirements.

Authentication via HTTP Header ​

You can authenticate using the HTTP header authorization. This header must be set with any remote call of the pipeline or command API endpoint.

Basic Authentication​

This authentication method takes the base64 encoded username and password, separated by a colon:

authorization: Basic <base64(username:password)>

This would look like this example for username alice and password foo:

authorization: Basic YWxpY2U6Zm9v

If you're using curl, you can specify the -u argument so curl is handling the base64 encoding and header placement for you:

curl "https://ns.pipeforce.net/api/v3/command/..." -u "alice:foo"

Bearer Authentication​

This authentication type is mostly used as part of OAuth 2.0 authentication flow.

At first you need to obtain the Bearer token from an exchange flow where the login credentials will be exchanged to a Bearer token.

Then you can set the Bearer token like this:

authorization: Bearer <token>

Here is an example how you can obtain the Bearer access token from PIPEFORCE IAM service:

export TOKEN_RESPONSE=`curl -X POST --location "https://iam-<ns>.pipeforce.net/auth/realms/<ns>/protocol/openid-connect/token" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
    -d "grant_type=password&client_id=pipeforce&username=<username>&password=<password>&scope=pipeforce"`

export PIPEFORCE_ACCESS_TOKEN=`echo $TOKEN_RESPONSE | jq -r '.access_token'`

curl "https://hub-<ns>.pipeforce.net/api/v3/command/..." -H  -H "authorization: Bearer ${PIPEFORCE_ACCESS_TOKEN}" 

RunAs Authentication​

This not really an authentication since it switches from an already, successfully authenticated user to another user in case the user has the permission to do so.

This method works only in case there is already a successfully authenticated user in the current request scope and it is allowed for this user to run as:

authorization: RunAs <username>

Refresh Authentication​

This authenticates using a refresh token from an OAuth 2.0 flow.

authorization: Refresh <token>

Authentication via IAM Command ​

In some cases it is required that authentication takes place inside a pipeline. For this, there are different iam.* commands available. See commands reference for details.