I'm using the Newsblur API and I want to export a list of all the stories in a feed to a file. But when I enter my password, I get an error

Question

I've recently gotten into RSS and I started using Newsblur. And I've…kind of bitten off more than I can chew.

I subscribed to some feeds that post wayyyyy too often and it’s super overwhelming. Before I unsubscribe or use that intelligence trainer feature Newsblur has, I want to get a list of all the entries that are already there so I don’t miss anything I’d actually be interested in. I'm assuming this will I'm guessing this is something I can do through the API, but before asking here I wanted to see if anything the Newsblur API page lists would work.

I attempted to log in through the command prompt first, and I attempted this (I used something like this for Feedbin earlier and it worked like a charm so I thought it might work here):

curl --request POST --user "<username>:<password>" http://newsblur.com/api/login'

{"code": -1, "errors": {"username": ["Please enter a username."]}, "result": "ok", "authenticated": false}

(Angle brackets not included, of course. Also not sure if I should separate the input and the output?)

I then attempted to run that command without the password and I thought I had it because it prompted me for a password, but after I put it in, it still gave me the same error. I tried pasting the password, I've tried actually typing it out, but to no avail.

curl --request POST --user "<username>" http://newsblur.com/api/login

Enter host password for user '<username>':
{"code": -1, "errors": {"username": ["Please enter a username."]}, "result": "ok", "authenticated": false}

I even tried using -u instead of --user but the same exact thing happened. I never really used curl before though so maybe I'm missing something really obvious?

Answer 1

I cannot validate this against a live api service at the moment, but after taking a look at the docs, I believe Newsblur is not using Basic Auth authentication (which is what -u/--user effectively does) - it expects you to pass user and password in the body of the request to /api.

And it probably sets a cookie in the response that must be sent in the requests that follow, so you may want to consult curl docs on how to work with cookies.