I often use curl to take a quick look at the responses of particular
endpoints. If I try to curl a URL that is secured with HTTP Basic
Authentication, this is what the response looks like:
$ curl staging.example.com
HTTP Basic: Access denied.I can give the credentials to curl so that it can plug them in as it makes
the request using the -u (or --user) flag:
$ curl -u username:password staging.example.com
<html><body>...</body></html>If I don't want the password showing up in my command-line history, I can
just provide the username and curl will prompt me for my password:
$ curl -u username staging.example.com
Enter host password for user 'username':
<html><body>...</body></html>See man curl for more details.