How to curl AB Connect (Bash)

This post goes over how to curl Certica’s Academic Benchmarks API. We’re using AB Connect 4.1.

Credentials

Set the partner ID and key:

PARTNER_ID=demo4
PARTNER_KEY=exMSobPnS7F0s/u/aKtakg

Authentication

Generate your auth signature. The signature consists of:

expires*
user id
HTTP method
resource

*The access expiration expressed in seconds since epoch. This is the only required field.

Expires

On Linux, to get expires 1 hour from now:

AUTH_EXPIRES=$(date -d 'today 1 hour' +%s)

On Mac, to get expires 1 hour from now:

AUTH_EXPIRES=$(date -j -v +1H -f "%Y-%m-%d" $(date +%Y-%m-%d) +%s)

Message

Generate your message by concatenating the fields with a newline character:

MESSAGE=$(echo -e "$AUTH_EXPIRES\n$USER_ID\n$HTTP_METHOD\n$RESOURCE")

Signature

Hash the message with HMAC SHA-256 and encode the binary output using Base64:

AUTH_SIGNATURE=$(
  echo -n $MESSAGE | \
  openssl sha256 -hmac $PARTNER_KEY -binary | \
  base64
)

cURL

The standards endpoint is https://api.abconnect.certicaconnect.com/rest/v4.1/standards/:

STANDARDS_URL="https://api.abconnect.certicaconnect.com/rest/v4.1/standards/"

URL-encode the query string fields before making the curl request:

curl --get \
  --data-urlencode "partner.id=$PARTNER_ID" \
  --data-urlencode "auth.signature=$AUTH_SIGNATURE" \
  --data-urlencode "auth.expires=$AUTH_EXPIRES" \
  $STANDARDS_URL

The required query string fields are:

partner.id
auth.signature
auth.expires

To pretty-print the JSON, you can parse the response output with jq:

curl --get --silent \
  --data-urlencode "partner.id=$PARTNER_ID" \
  --data-urlencode "auth.signature=$AUTH_SIGNATURE" \
  --data-urlencode "auth.expires=$AUTH_EXPIRES" \
  $STANDARDS_URL \
  | jq

Demo

Repl.it: