Updated script for obtaining, checking and renewing Bearer Tokens for the Classic and Jamf Pro APIs

Following my earlier posts on obtaining, checking and renewing Bearer Tokens for the Jamf Pro API and the deprecation of Basic Authentication for the Jamf Pro Classic API, @bryson3gps reached out to let me know there was a simpler way to get the Bearer Token which didn’t require the prior encoding of the username and password credentials in base64 format.

The command shown below will handle obtaining the token using Basic Authentication on macOS Monterey and later:

curl -X POST -u username:password -s https://server.name.here/api/v1/auth/token | plutil -extract token raw –

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The command shown below will handle obtaining the token using Basic Authentication on macOS Big Sur and earlier:

curl -X POST -u username:password -s https://server.name.here/api/v1/auth/token | python -c 'import sys, json; print json.load(sys.stdin)["token"]'

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This allows the following functions to be collapsed into one command:

• Encoding the username and password in base64 format
• Obtaining a Bearer Token using Basic Authentication
• Storing the Bearer Token (if command is used in a variable.)

He also pointed out that I was using an incorrect API call for the validation check which uses HTTP status codes. What I had:

/usr/bin/curl –write-out %{http_code} –silent –output /dev/null "${jamfpro_url}/api/v1/auth/keep-alive" –request POST –header "Authorization: Bearer ${api_token}"

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While this worked, it was using the keepalive endpoint with a POST request, which is used to invalidate tokens and issue new ones. I’ve updated to use this instead:

/usr/bin/curl –write-out %{http_code} –silent –output /dev/null "${jamfpro_url}/api/v1/auth" –request GET –header "Authorization: Bearer ${api_token}"

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This API call sends a GET request to the auth endpoint, which returns all the authorization details associated with the current Bearer Token. This will work for the validation check and won’t trigger accidental invalidation of the existing Bearer Token.

With this in mind, the process of obtaining Bearer Tokens is now simplified. This affects the deprecation of the Classic API for Jamf Pro 10.35.0 and later by changing the workflow from this:

To this:

I’ve incorporated these changes into an updated script with functions for obtaining, checking and renewing Bearer Tokens for the Classic (for Jamf Pro 10.35.0 and later) and Jamf Pro APIs. For more details, please see below the jump.