401 When POST to get Personal Access token (PAT)

[Andrew]

I'm trying to create a Personal Access token (PAT) using the REST API by sending a POST request with the following body:

{
    "name": "tokenName",
    "expirationDuration": 90
}

to 

{{baseUrlOfYourInstance}}/rest/pat/latest/tokens

 but I keep getting a 401 Unauthorized error back.  The documentation here doesn't specify how to authenticate initially when trying to obtain a personal access token via the REST API. It just states to do what I am doing and you should get a personal access token back.  

Do you need to use basic auth first in order to get the PAT and then future requests can just use the PAT for authentication?

[Kurt Klinner · Accepted solution]

@Andrew 

Hi Andrew

welcome to the Atlassian community

To get the token you need first to send an authenticated request, so instead of using for example 

curl https://YOURJIRAURL//rest/pat/latest/tokens

use

 curl -u 'USERNAME:PASSWORD'  \
--request POST  \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
https://YOURJIRAURL//rest/pat/latest/tokens  \
-d '{ "name": "tokenName", "expirationDuration": 90}' 

You should get a response similar to 

{"id":1,"name":"tokenName","createdAt":"2022-10-03T17:08:47.573+00:00","expiringAt":"2023-01-01T17:08:47.573+00:00","rawToken":"XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/IJ3l0/7QfoCzA96KDX7PkN"}⏎

Hope that helps

Cheers

Kurt

[Andrew]

Thanks for the answer.

It looks like I will still need to use Basic Authentication in order to get the PAT and then from there I can just use the PAT for future requests.

[Roma Bubyakin _Wombats Corp_]

Or you can create a token upfront from the WebUI and use it there (which is better practice)

[Ben Steinwand]

Greetings, 

If the user authenticates to JIRA/Confluence with a public SSO like 'sign in with google' what parameters should be used for:

'USERNAME:PASSWORD'

 The email address and password for my associated Google account does not seem to work.