In Flutter, if you want your HTTP requests to be authenticated, you must utilize this Authorization class and read this blog to know how to authenticate HTTP in Flutter. Most web services require authorization before you can retrieve data. There are several approaches to accomplish this, but one of the most prevalent is to employ the Authorization HTTP header.
HTTP Authentication Foundation
To get started, we must first understand the foundations of HTTP authentication to broaden our understanding. Accordingly, there are two types of HTTP authentication, which are Basic Access and Digest Access. We’re going to focus our attention on Basic Access as this is what the Flutter HTTP package utilizes.
Foundationally, Basic access authentication is a technique for an HTTP user agent (e.g., a web browser) to submit a user name and password while making a request in the context of an HTTP transaction. A request for basic HTTP authentication includes a header element that reads “Authorization: Basic “, where credentials is the Base64 encoding of the ID and password separated by a single colon “:”. This was strikingly similar to authenticate HTTP in Flutter.
Additionally, in terms of features, It does not require cookies, session identifiers, or login pages, HTTP Basic Authentication (BA) implementation is the simplest way of implementing access controls to web services. Instead, HTTP Basic authentication employs standard fields in the HTTP header.
As a result, The Basic Access method does not safeguard the sent credentials’ confidentiality. They are only Base64 encoded in transit and are not encrypted or hashed in any way. As a result, to ensure confidentiality, basic authentication is often used in conjunction with HTTPS.
Because the Basic Access field must be supplied in the HTTP request header, the web browser must cache credentials for a reasonable amount of time to avoid repeatedly requesting the user for their username and password. Browsers’ caching policies differ. Despite this, In Flutter such operations are already working in the background and can be easily be implemented without us tinkering on the background of the package.
Authenticating HTTP In Flutter
Now that we know the foundation of the authentication it is time to utilize it. For instance, The http package makes it easy to add headers to your requests. Alternatively, utilize the HttpHeaders class in the dart:io library. Here’s the code example below in Flutter.
final response = await http.get(
Uri.parse('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/albums/1'),
// Send authorization headers to the backend.
headers: {
HttpHeaders.authorizationHeader: 'Basic your_api_token_here',
},
);Conclusion
There are two types of HTTP authentication, which are Basic Access and Digest Access. Basic access authentication is a technique for an HTTP user agent to submit a user name and password while making a request in the context of an HTTP transaction. In constrast to this blog we have used an API key instead of the username and password credentials.
Furthermore the Basic Access method does not safeguard the sent credentials’ confidentiality. They are only Base64 encoded in transit and are not encrypted or hashed in any way. I’ve showed you how to implement it on Flutter with the code above. If you found this blog outdated you could always visit the official flutter documentation about this. Later on you’d be deleting data using the http package thus I suggest you to check my last blog post about it. Thank you for reading, If you found this useful please share it.