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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
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Let's get started with a Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud:

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eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

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eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
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Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Do JSON right with Jackson

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eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
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Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

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eBook – Maven – NPI EA (cat = Maven)
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Get Started with Apache Maven:

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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
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Building a REST API with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

>> LEARN SPRING
Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

>> The New “REST With Spring Boot”

Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
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Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
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All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

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Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:

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Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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eBook – HTTP Client – NPI (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

Table of Contents

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to use Spring’s RestTemplate to consume a RESTful Service secured with Basic Authentication.

Once we set up Basic Authentication for the template, each request will be sent preemptively containing the full credentials necessary to perform the authentication process. The credentials will be encoded, and use the Authorization HTTP Header, in accordance with the specs of the Basic Authentication scheme. An example would look like this:

Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==

Further reading:

Spring RestTemplate Error Handling

Learn how to handle errors with Spring's RestTemplate

Using the Spring RestTemplate Interceptor

Learn about using interceptors in your Spring application with the RestTemplate.

Exploring the Spring Boot TestRestTemplate

Learn how to use the new TestRestTemplate in Spring Boot to test a simple API.

2. Setting up the RestTemplate

We can bootstrap the RestTemplate into the Spring context simply by declaring a bean for it; however, setting up the RestTemplate with Basic Authentication will require manual intervention, so instead of declaring the bean directly, we’ll use a Spring FactoryBean for more flexibility. This FactoryBean will create and configure the template on initialization:

@Component
public class RestTemplateFactory
  implements FactoryBean<RestTemplate>, InitializingBean {
 
    private RestTemplate restTemplate;

    public RestTemplate getObject() {
        return restTemplate;
    }
    public Class<RestTemplate> getObjectType() {
        return RestTemplate.class;
    }
    public boolean isSingleton() {
        return true;
    }

    public void afterPropertiesSet() {
        HttpHost host = new HttpHost("localhost", 8082, "http");
        restTemplate = new RestTemplate(
          new HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactoryBasicAuth(host));
    }
}

The host and port values should be dependent on the environment, allowing the client the flexibility to define one set of values for integration testing and another for production use. The values can be managed by the first class Spring support for properties files.

3. Manual Management of the Authorization HTTP Header

It’s fairly straightforward for us to create the Authorization header for Basic Authentication, so we can do it manually with a few lines of code:

HttpHeaders createHeaders(String username, String password){
   return new HttpHeaders() {{
         String auth = username + ":" + password;
         byte[] encodedAuth = Base64.encodeBase64( 
            auth.getBytes(Charset.forName("US-ASCII")) );
         String authHeader = "Basic " + new String( encodedAuth );
         set( "Authorization", authHeader );
      }};
}

Furthermore, sending a request is just as simple:

restTemplate.exchange
 (uri, HttpMethod.POST, new HttpEntity<T>(createHeaders(username, password)), clazz);

4. Automatic Management of the Authorization HTTP Header

Spring 3.0 and 3.1, and now 4.x, have very good support for the Apache HTTP libraries:

  • In Spring 3.0, the CommonsClientHttpRequestFactory integrated with the now end-of-life’d HttpClient 3.x.
  • Spring 3.1 introduced support for the current HttpClient 4.x via HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory (support added in the JIRA SPR-6180).
  • Spring 4.0 introduced async support via the HttpComponentsAsyncClientHttpRequestFactory.

Let’s start setting things up with HttpClient 4 and Spring 4.

The RestTemplate will require an HTTP request factory that supports Basic Authentication. However, using the existing HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory directly will prove to be difficult, as the architecture of RestTemplate was designed without good support for HttpContext, an instrumental piece of the puzzle. As such, we’ll need to subclass HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory and override the createHttpContext method:

public class HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactoryBasicAuth 
  extends HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory {

    HttpHost host;

    public HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactoryBasicAuth(HttpHost host) {
        super();
        this.host = host;
    }

    protected HttpContext createHttpContext(HttpMethod httpMethod, URI uri) {
        return createHttpContext();
    }
    
    private HttpContext createHttpContext() {
        AuthCache authCache = new BasicAuthCache();

        BasicScheme basicAuth = new BasicScheme();
        authCache.put(host, basicAuth);

        BasicHttpContext localcontext = new BasicHttpContext();
        localcontext.setAttribute(HttpClientContext.AUTH_CACHE, authCache);
        return localcontext;
    }
}

We built the basic authentication support in here, in the creation of the HttpContext. As we can see, it’s a bit of a burden for us to do preemptive Basic Authentication with HttpClient 4.x. The authentication info is cached, and it’s very manual and non-intuitive for us to set up this authentication cache.

Now that everything is in place, the RestTemplate will be able to support the Basic Authentication scheme just by adding a BasicAuthorizationInterceptor:

restTemplate.getInterceptors().add(
  new BasicAuthorizationInterceptor("username", "password"));

Then the request:

restTemplate.exchange(
  "http://localhost:8082/spring-security-rest-basic-auth/api/foos/1", 
  HttpMethod.GET, null, Foo.class);

For an in-depth discussion on how to secure the REST Service itself, check out this article.

5. Maven Dependencies

We’ll require the following Maven dependencies for the RestTemplate itself and for the HttpClient library:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
   <version>6.0.13</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.apache.httpcomponents.client5</groupId>
   <artifactId>httpclient5</artifactId>
   <version>5.2.1</version>
</dependency>

Optionally, if we construct the HTTP Authorization header manually, then we’ll require an additional library for the encoding support:

<dependency>
   <groupId>commons-codec</groupId>
   <artifactId>commons-codec</artifactId>
   <version>1.10</version>
</dependency>

We can find the newest versions in the Maven repository: spring-webmvc, httpclient5 and commons-codec.

6. Conclusion

Much of the information that can be found on RestTemplate and security still doesn’t account for the current HttpClient 4.x releases, even though the 3.x branch is end-of-life’d and Spring’s support for that version is fully deprecated. In this article, we attempt to change that by going through a detailed, step by step discussion on how to set up Basic Authentication with the RestTemplate and use it to consume a secured REST API.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.

This is a Maven-based project, so it should be easy to import and run as is.

Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – LS – NPI (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

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Course – LSS – NPI (cat=Security/Spring Security)
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I just announced the new Learn Spring Security course, including the full material focused on the new OAuth2 stack in Spring Security:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Partner – Microsoft – NPI (cat=Spring)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)