Category: HTTP

curl HTTPS Over an SSH Tunnel

Posted on by rchapin

If you want to execute curl commands on your local machine and connect to an HTTPS server that is only reachable from a bastion or other host through which you can only get to via SSH, the following is how you set up the SSH tunnel and execute the curl command.

The following will not work

# Create ssh tunnel
#
ssh -L localhost:8443:example.com:443 user@bastion.example.com

# Attempt to hit the endpoint otherwise accessible from bastion.example.com
# with curl -X GET
→ Continue reading “curl HTTPS Over an SSH Tunnel”

Mocking an HTTPS RESTful endpoint with Netcat

Posted on by rchapin

Netcat is generally known as a TCP/IP Swiss Army Knife and is incredibly helpful for both debugging and mocking up network services

Following is an example on how to setup a mock RESTful service that communicates over HTTPS.

On the “server” side, run the following command.  The -l command instructs Netcat to listen.

while true; do { echo -e “HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n$(date)\r\n\r\n<h1>hello world from $(hostname) on $(date)</h1>” |  nc -vl –ssl 8080; } done

On the “client” side, run the → Continue reading “Mocking an HTTPS RESTful endpoint with Netcat”

Using netcat to Mock a RESTful Webservice that Returns JSON

Posted on by rchapin

Let’s say that you are working on a part of a project that needs to consume some JSON data from a forthcoming HTTP service.  That sub-system is being developed by one of your colleagues and is not yet ready for you to stand-up to develop against.

You can use netcat to mock the webservice and return some static JSON data for which you can develop and test against with a simple one-liner.

First, put together your JSON in a file, → Continue reading “Using netcat to Mock a RESTful Webservice that Returns JSON”

How to Use Credentials That Contain Special Characters with curl

Posted on by rchapin

In order to execute curl commands to endpoints with passwords that contain special characters, the cleanest way that I have found to do so is to Base64 encode the authentication string for curl and then pass an Authorization request header along with the request.

In this example the credentials are uid ‘rchapin’ and passwd ‘abc123!@#’.  Normally we would pass this to curl as follows:

$ curl -u rchapin:abc123!@# -X GET https://some-endpoint:443

However, this will not work and the password will → Continue reading “How to Use Credentials That Contain Special Characters with curl”

Do Not Use Symlinks in Jetty’s webapps Directory

Posted on by rchapin

I set up a development instance of Jetty on my local machine and have been happily coding, compiling and deploying via a shell script.  The script copies the war from my user’s target directory to the jetty users’s home dir changes the permissions and then moves it to the /webapp dir creating a symlink to the name of the .war that is referenced in a number of config files.

This was working just fine until I did a merge with → Continue reading “Do Not Use Symlinks in Jetty’s webapps Directory”

© 2005 Ryan Chapin