# Need help with Mautic API and BasicAuth
**URL:** https://forum.mautic.org/t/need-help-with-mautic-api-and-basicauth/16129
**Category:** Product Support
**Created:** [September 16, 2020, 6:16pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/need-help-with-mautic-api-and-basicauth/16129 "2020-09-16T18:16:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@anon72082592](https://forum.mautic.org/u/anon72082592)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2020, 6:16pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/need-help-with-mautic-api-and-basicauth/16129/1 "2020-09-16T18:16:41Z")
My Mautic version is: 2.16
My PHP version is: 7.2
Hello there, I’m trying to use mautic’s api to update contact field dynamically. I cannot use Oauth since the token(s) are expiring and I don’t want to generate new tokens since it’s should be “always working”.
I would like to use BasicAuth for this purpose, and I downloaded the example code.
My problem is: how do I set up basic auth for mautic ? If I create an htaccess + htpasswd to the mautic base url, every visitor of my website will get a prompt asking for password since I embed the mautic tracking script (?). I get all the time an error “401 Unauthorized”, probably because I have not linked a username and password to the API.
How do I proceed?
Thank you.
These errors are showing in the log: 401: The response has unexpected status code (401). Access denied.
Steps I have tried to fix the problem: read every single API documentation pages, searched all over Internet and didn’t find this specific problem.
---
### Author:  [@joeyk](https://forum.mautic.org/u/joeyk)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2020, 6:46pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/need-help-with-mautic-api-and-basicauth/16129/2 "2020-09-16T18:46:11Z")
Hi basic auth is a USER 🙂
So this is what you do:
1. Turn on basic auth on your config
2. Create a user with username and psw
3. REBUILD CACHE (important)
Than you can api in with basic auth. Example in php:
```
$curl = curl_init();
// Set some options - we are passing in a useragent too here
curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
CURLOPT_URL => "https://".$loginname.":".$password."@".$siteurl."/api/contacts/new",
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => 'Randomguy Software Api Call',
CURLOPT_POST => 1,
CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => array(
'email' => $email,
'firstname' => $firstname,
'lastname' => $lastname,
'order_time' => date("Y-m-d H:i:s")
)
));
// Send the request & save response to $resp
$resp = curl_exec($curl);
// Close request to clear up some resources
curl_close($curl);
};
```
Good luck!
Joey
---
### Author:  [@anon72082592](https://forum.mautic.org/u/anon72082592)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2020, 6:55pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/need-help-with-mautic-api-and-basicauth/16129/3 "2020-09-16T18:55:06Z")
Hello joeyk!
Perfect answer, thank you very much, I just found out it was the username of a user 2 seconds before your answer haha!
I was searching too far…
So I guess I will create a user for this specific purpose instead of using the administrator account.
Thank you again.