Cloudera Docs

API Key Authentication

Cloudera recommends using your API key for requests instead of your actual username/password so as to avoid storing and sending your credentials in plaintext. The API key is a randomly generated token that is unique to each user. It must be treated as highly sensitive information because it can be used to start jobs via the API.

To look up your Cloudera Data Science Workbench API key:
  1. Sign in to Cloudera Data Science Workbench.
  2. From the upper right drop-down menu, switch context to your personal account.
  3. Click Settings.
  4. Select the API Key tab.
    The following example demonstrates how to construct an HTTP request using the standard basic authentication technique. Most tools and libraries, such as Curl and Python Requests, support basic authentication and can set the required Authorization header for you. For example, with curl you can pass the API Key to the --user flag and leave the password field blank. 
    curl -v -XPOST http://cdsw.example.com/api/v1/<path_to_job> --user "<API_KEY>:"
    To access the API using a library that does not provide Basic Authentication convenience methods, set the request's Authorization header to Basic <API_KEY_encoded_in_base64> . For example, if your API key is uysgxtj7jzkps96njextnxxmq05usp0b, set Authorization to Basic dXlzZ3h0ajdqemtwczk2bmpleHRueHhtcTA1dXNwMGI6.