Basic Authentication (Basic Auth) is a simple but effective way to restrict access to your services by requiring a valid username and password before allowing requests to reach your upstream service. When Basic Authentication is enabled: 🔐 Requests without valid credentials are automatically rejected with a 401 Unauthorized response.
🔐 Only authenticated users can access your protected services.
⚡ Authentication is enforced at the gateway level, reducing security overhead for your backend.

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🔍 What are the Benefits of Basic Authentication?

HTTP Basic Authentication is a simple yet effective way to restrict access to sensitive services without requiring complex identity providers or OAuth-based authentication systems. Key Benefits:
  • Securing development or staging environments from public access.
  • Adding a lightweight authentication layer when no other auth system is available.
  • Protecting internal admin panels, dashboards, or API endpoints.
  • Protect temporary or short-lived services without setting up an OAuth provider.
If you need more secure authentication methods for production traffic, consider the OAuth, OIDC, and JWT Validation guides.

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Basic Authentication Examples

The following examples show how to set up an endpoint that accepts requests that contain basic auth credentials for either user:password1 or admin:password2. All other requests will be denied with a 401 response code. Check out the basic auth traffic policy action page for more details about how it functions and the parameters it accepts. 
apiVersion: ngrok.k8s.ngrok.com/v1alpha1
kind: AgentEndpoint
metadata:
name: example-agent-endpoint
spec:
url: https://example-hostname.ngrok.io
upstream:
  url: http://my-service.my-namespace:8080
trafficPolicy:
  inline:
    on_http_request:
    - actions:
      - type: basic-auth
        config:
          realm: sample-realm
          credentials:
            - user:password1
            - admin:password2
          enforce: true