bitcoin: Unable to call an rpc method via curl with no authentication

My config: ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf


  daemon=1
  prune=600
  maxconnections=12
  maxuploadtarget=20
  server=1

Version:


$ bitcoind --version
Bitcoin Core Daemon version v0.14.0.0-g43a987c1c
Copyright (C) 2009-2017 The Bitcoin Core developers

Why doesn’t this work and require authentication?

$ curl -v --data-binary '{"jsonrpc": "1.0", "id":"curltest", "method": "getinfo", "params": [] }' -H 'content-type: text/plain;' http://127.0.0.1:8332/
*   Trying 127.0.0.1...
* Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 8332 (#0)
> POST / HTTP/1.1
> Host: 127.0.0.1:8332
> User-Agent: curl/7.47.0
> Accept: */*
> content-type: text/plain;
> Content-Length: 71
> 
* upload completely sent off: 71 out of 71 bytes
< HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
< WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="jsonrpc"
< Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2017 05:09:10 GMT
< Content-Length: 0
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
< 
* Connection #0 to host 127.0.0.1 left intact

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 7 years ago
Comments: 23 (14 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

You have three options:

Set rpcuser and rpcpassword in bitcoin.conf. If you do that, you must pass that username and password as auth info in curl.
Set one or more rpcauth lines in bitcoin.conf. If you do that, you must pass one of those username/password pairs in curl.
Don’t configure anything in bitcoin.conf. In that case, bitcoind will generate an authentication cookie for you, and write a username/password pair into the .cookie file. You must use the information in that file when connecting via curl.

sipa on Apr 16, 2017

@GildedHonour Authentication is not optional. Configuring it yourself is optional, but bitcoind never accepts RPC connections without explicitly or implicitly configured username/password.

sipa on Apr 16, 2017

__cookie__ is the username. 3784b8eb00726c09b275aff93882b7859cf482b8f714931343fds32431234gaa is the password.

Note that the 3rd method isn’t really intended to be used that way. If you need extra work to support it from your client code, it’s much easier to just configure a password with rpcpassword or rpcauth.

sipa on Apr 16, 2017