Identify incorrect Personal Access Token
Asked by Kai Gao:

Hi team,

For a product that we are building, we take PAT as an input from our customers and use it to call customer's Confluence Server URL. If an incorrect PAT is provided, we should communicate the same to our customers. Unfortunately, Confluence server doesn't return an appropriate HTTP error code, instead returns a 200 HTTP code always, like a correct PAT (only the response content differs). So, it's hard to distinguish an incorrect PAT unless we parse the response, which I don't think is a reliable way. However basic authentication with username, password results in appropriate HTTP codes - for correct credentials, 200 and 401 for incorrect ones.

For your reference, below are curl outputs when I queried Confluence spaces with PAT -

**Query space with a correct PAT -**

```


$ % curl -iH "Authorization: Bearer <correct PAT>" https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***/rest/api/space

HTTP/2 200 

date: Mon, 01 Aug 2022 05:52:32 GMT

content-type: application/json

server: nginx/1.19.2

set-cookie: JSESSIONID=916B87FE907B2D7A47BF88AEC027A0D4; Path=/; HttpOnly

x-seraph-loginreason: OK

x-ausername: admin

cache-control: no-store

expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT

x-content-type-options: nosniff

{"results":[{"id":560037,"key":"1SPAC","name":"1_space","type":"global","_links":{"webui":"/display/1SPAC","self":"https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***/rest/api/space/1SPAC"},"_expandable":{"metadata":"","icon":"","description":"","retentionPolicy":"","homepage":"/rest/api/content/419305"}},{"id":557416,"key":"ARC","name":"ARC","type":"global","_links":{"webui":"/display/ARC","self":"https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***/rest/api/space/ARC"},"_expandable":{"metadata":"","icon":"","description":"","retentionPolicy":"","homepage":"/rest/api/content/396145"}},{"id":561910,"key":"BLAN","name":"Blank_Space_Test","type":"global","_links":{"webui":"/display/BLAN","self":"https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***/rest/api/space/BLAN"},"_expandable":{"metadata":"","icon":"","description":"","retentionPolicy":"","homepage":"/rest/api/content/4895011"}},{"id":561909,"key":"~confluence-space-admin","name":" confluence-space-admin","type":"personal","_links":{"webui":"/spaces/viewspace.action?key=~confluence-space-admin","self":"https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***/rest/api/space/~confluence-space-admin"} ... [TRUNCATED]


```

**Query space with an incorrect PAT -**

```
% curl -iH "Authorization: Bearer <incorrect PAT>" https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***/rest/api/space 

HTTP/2 200 

date: Mon, 01 Aug 2022 05:52:46 GMT

content-type: application/json

server: nginx/1.19.2

set-cookie: JSESSIONID=FBE9C5B2F91504182F3319E6EEA7A54B; Path=/; HttpOnly

cache-control: no-store

expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT

x-content-type-options: nosniff



{"results":[{"id":557057,"key":"IN","name":"Initial","type":"global","_links":{"webui":"/display/IN","self":"https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***/rest/api/space/IN"},"_expandable":{"metadata":"","icon":"","description":"","retentionPolicy":""}}],"start":0,"limit":25,"size":1,"_links":{"self":"https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***/rest/api/space","base":"https://confluence.integ.***REDACTED***","context":""}
```

Could you please help me understand if this is an expected behavior with PAT and if there is any reliable way to identify an incorrect PAT?

Thank you!


Answers:
author: aorlov
body: Hi [@Kai Gao](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3983127) . The REST API documentation <https://docs.atlassian.com/ConfluenceServer/rest/7.17.1/#space-spaces> tells that it is an expected behavior. The response code is always 200 .

Some advice: Can you analyse field results? I'm not sure, but may be. If it is empty then...


Tags: confluence-server

personal-access-token

server