How to use cURL with Sakai

The first step is to get a session cookie which will be stored in a file called ‘cookie.txt’. This appears to be known as a “cookie jar”!

Issue this command in a ‘terminal’ window substituting the login credentials. Do be mindful of other people seeing the credentials if working with a production system.

curl -c cookie.txt "https://trunk-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org/api/login?username=<username>&password=<password>"

This will write a session cookie to the file cookie.txt and write out the session ID to the screen.

You can now test this out by making a (GET) request which will only work if you are authenticated. I logged in as the admin user and queried the preferences of user with ID c00d896c-57cc-4fd7-a65f-a13d08dfde:

curl -b cookie.txt 'https://trunk-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org/direct/userPrefs/c00d896c-57cc-4fd7-a65f-a13d08dfde.json'

This returned a whole heap of JSON. Had the authentication not worked then a “403 Error Page” would have been seen.

If you are curious then try looking at the contents of cookie.txt. It should look like this:

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File

# https://curl.se/docs/http-cookies.html

# This file was generated by libcurl! Edit at your own risk.

trunk-maria.nightly.sakaiproject.org FALSE / TRUE 0 SAKAIID XXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXx.ip-X-X-X-X