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Basic Auth Header Generator

Turn a username and password into an Authorization: Basic header, or paste a header you already have and read the credentials back out. Everything happens in your browser.

About HTTP basic authentication

Basic authentication joins the username and password with a colon, encodes the result as Base64, and sends it as Authorization: Basic <value> on every request. A server asks for it by answering 401 with WWW-Authenticate: Basic, and that is the whole scheme — no nonce, no hashing, no session.

The username must not contain a colon, because the server splits on the first one it finds. The password may contain anything, including colons. Putting credentials in a URL instead is a different syntax with different rules: characters such as @, /, # and : have to be percent-encoded there, which the URL output above does for you.

Base64 is not encryption

Anyone who sees the header can decode it back to the original password in a second — this page does exactly that in the Decode tab. Basic authentication is only safe over HTTPS, and the credentials travel on every single request.

Your credentials stay here

Encoding and decoding both happen in this page. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged, or sent anywhere.

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