How to non-interactively provide auth info to URL, and how to force URL to use HTTP AUTH

[Edward O'Connor]

Hi,

I've made a lot of use out of url.el over the years, and it's for the
most part been a nice experience. But I haven't been able to wrap my
brain around how to use HTTP AUTH in a nice-to-the-user way.

Here's the scenario: I work on several elisp clients for various APIs
which are exposed via HTTP and make use of HTTP AUTH. When a developer
uses my library, they supply the relevant auth info to my library
explicitly. I would then like to invoke url-retreive and have the
resulting request use basic (or digest) auth with the auth info I
already have, *without prompting the user* for a username or password. I
keep failing to figure out how to do this.

I'd really rather not resort to shelling out to curl, but this is *very
easy* to do with curl (a simple "curl -u user:pass url-to-api-call" will
do), and it's not at all clear how to do it with url.el.

Any suggestions on how to proceed would be most welcome!


Thanks,
Ted