Login to Gitlab with username and password using cURL
With some helpful tips by other answers and comments, I finally came up with this solution:
gitlab_host="http://localhost:8080"
gitlab_user="root"
gitlab_password="12341234"
# curl for the login page to get a session cookie and the sources with the auth tokens
body_header=$(curl -c cookies.txt -i "${gitlab_host}/users/sign_in" -s)
# grep the auth token for the user login for
# not sure whether another token on the page will work, too - there are 3 of them
csrf_token=$(echo $body_header | perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /new_user.*?authenticity_token"[[:blank:]]value="(.+?)"/' | sed -n 1p)
# send login credentials with curl, using cookies and token from previous request
curl -b cookies.txt -c cookies.txt -i "${gitlab_host}/users/sign_in" \
--data "user[login]=${gitlab_user}&user[password]=${gitlab_password}" \
--data-urlencode "authenticity_token=${csrf_token}"
# send curl GET request to personal access token page to get auth token
body_header=$(curl -H 'user-agent: curl' -b cookies.txt -i "${gitlab_host}/profile/personal_access_tokens" -s)
csrf_token=$(echo $body_header | perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /authenticity_token"[[:blank:]]value="(.+?)"/' | sed -n 1p)
# curl POST request to send the "generate personal access token form"
# the response will be a redirect, so we have to follow using `-L`
body_header=$(curl -L -b cookies.txt "${gitlab_host}/profile/personal_access_tokens" \
--data-urlencode "authenticity_token=${csrf_token}" \
--data 'personal_access_token[name]=golab-generated&personal_access_token[expires_at]=&personal_access_token[scopes][]=api')
# Scrape the personal access token from the response HTML
personal_access_token=$(echo $body_header | perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /created-personal-access-token"[[:blank:]]value="(.+?)"/' | sed -n 1p)
According to the GitLab API documentation you can now use the session cookie to authenticate API requests:
curl --header "Private-Token: ${personal_access_token}" https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects
Some hints:
- I first got confused with the
curl -c file(which reads cookies from the headers and writes them to the file) vs. thecurl -b file(which uses the cookies in the file and sends them with the request) - Unfortunately I did not find a regex that worked with
sedso I have to useperlhere. - Using the developer console in Chrome and copying a
POSTrequest as curl command was very helpful: https://www.alexkras.com/copy-any-api-call-as-curl-request-with-chrome-developer-tools/
what is in ${cookie} exactly? in my tests, there were 4 cookies from the login page, 3 of which looks like tokens, it wouldn't surprise me if at least 1 more cookie other than the _gitlab_session cookie was required for logging in successfully. but instead of bothering to find the correct combination of required cookies, i think it would be better to just let curl handle cookies automatically, eg --cookie-jar and --cookie (then all of the cookies should be correct) - further more, there is 3 different authenticity_token's on the login page, are you sure you fetch the correct one? maybe your problem is that you're fetching the wrong token. differentiating between the 3 tokens is so difficult that i recommend resorting to a scripting language instead.
here's a tested working example in PHP using hhb_curl (just replace the username and password on line 10 & 11):
<?php
declare(strict_types = 1);
require_once ('hhb_.inc.php');
$hc = new hhb_curl ( '', true );
$html = $hc->exec ( 'https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in' )->getStdOut ();
$domd = @DOMDocument::loadHTML ( $html );
$inputs = getDOMDocumentFormInputs ( $domd, true, false ) ['new_user'];
// var_dump ( $inputs );
$inputs ['user[login]'] = '???';
$inputs ['user[password]'] = '???';
$html = $hc->setopt_array ( array (
CURLOPT_POST => 1,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => http_build_query ( $inputs )
) )->exec ()->getStdOut ();
echo $html;
$domd = @DOMDocument::loadHTML ( $html );
$xp = new DOMXPath ( $domd );
foreach ( $xp->query ( '//div[contains(@class,"flash-alert")]' ) as $loginError ) {
var_dump ( "login error: ", trim($loginError->textContent) );
}
function getDOMDocumentFormInputs(\DOMDocument $domd, bool $getOnlyFirstMatches = false, bool $getElements = true): array {
// :DOMNodeList?
if (! $getOnlyFirstMatches && ! $getElements) {
throw new \InvalidArgumentException ( '!$getElements is currently only implemented for $getOnlyFirstMatches (cus im lazy and nobody has written the code yet)' );
}
$forms = $domd->getElementsByTagName ( 'form' );
$parsedForms = array ();
$isDescendantOf = function (\DOMNode $decendant, \DOMNode $ele): bool {
$parent = $decendant;
while ( NULL !== ($parent = $parent->parentNode) ) {
if ($parent === $ele) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
};
// i can't use array_merge on DOMNodeLists :(
$merged = function () use (&$domd): array {
$ret = array ();
foreach ( $domd->getElementsByTagName ( "input" ) as $input ) {
$ret [] = $input;
}
foreach ( $domd->getElementsByTagName ( "textarea" ) as $textarea ) {
$ret [] = $textarea;
}
foreach ( $domd->getElementsByTagName ( "button" ) as $button ) {
$ret [] = $button;
}
return $ret;
};
$merged = $merged ();
foreach ( $forms as $form ) {
$inputs = function () use (&$domd, &$form, &$isDescendantOf, &$merged): array {
$ret = array ();
foreach ( $merged as $input ) {
// hhb_var_dump ( $input->getAttribute ( "name" ), $input->getAttribute ( "id" ) );
if ($input->hasAttribute ( "disabled" )) {
// ignore disabled elements?
continue;
}
$name = $input->getAttribute ( "name" );
if ($name === '') {
// echo "inputs with no name are ignored when submitted by mainstream browsers (presumably because of specs)... follow suite?", PHP_EOL;
continue;
}
if (! $isDescendantOf ( $input, $form ) && $form->getAttribute ( "id" ) !== '' && $input->getAttribute ( "form" ) !== $form->getAttribute ( "id" )) {
// echo "this input does not belong to this form.", PHP_EOL;
continue;
}
if (! array_key_exists ( $name, $ret )) {
$ret [$name] = array (
$input
);
} else {
$ret [$name] [] = $input;
}
}
return $ret;
};
$inputs = $inputs (); // sorry about that, Eclipse gets unstable on IIFE syntax.
$hasName = true;
$name = $form->getAttribute ( "id" );
if ($name === '') {
$name = $form->getAttribute ( "name" );
if ($name === '') {
$hasName = false;
}
}
if (! $hasName) {
$parsedForms [] = array (
$inputs
);
} else {
if (! array_key_exists ( $name, $parsedForms )) {
$parsedForms [$name] = array (
$inputs
);
} else {
$parsedForms [$name] [] = $tmp;
}
}
}
unset ( $form, $tmp, $hasName, $name, $i, $input );
if ($getOnlyFirstMatches) {
foreach ( $parsedForms as $key => $val ) {
$parsedForms [$key] = $val [0];
}
unset ( $key, $val );
foreach ( $parsedForms as $key1 => $val1 ) {
foreach ( $val1 as $key2 => $val2 ) {
$parsedForms [$key1] [$key2] = $val2 [0];
}
}
}
if ($getElements) {
return $parsedForms;
}
$ret = array ();
foreach ( $parsedForms as $formName => $arr ) {
$ret [$formName] = array ();
foreach ( $arr as $ele ) {
$ret [$formName] [$ele->getAttribute ( "name" )] = $ele->getAttribute ( "value" );
}
}
return $ret;
}
it currently outputs
string(13) "login error: " string(26) "Invalid Login or password."
meaning that ???/??? is not a valid username & password combination.