Drupal - Setting Up Drupal 8 REST Post Request

As I still ran into a lot of 403 Forbidden errors I'll summarize my overall solution here (Drupal 8.0.1):

1.) Setup & Configuration

Enable all core web services modules (HAL, HTTP Basic Authentication, RESTful Web Services, Serialization

Enable relevant permissions of RESTful Web Services and for creating the relevant Nodes.

2.) Get a CSRF Token:

GET http://your-drupal8/rest/session/token

3.) POST to create a new node

POST http://your-drupal8/entity/node?_format=hal+json

Note that the URL for POST seems to be /entity/node rather than /node

Headers:

Authorization: Basic QWRt...
X-CSRF-Token: zCf...

Data

{
"title": [
  { "value": "atest2" }
],
"type": [
  { "target_id": "article" }
],
"_links": {
  "type": { "href": "http://your-drupal8/rest/type/node/article" }
}
}