Basic authentication is a easy to use authentication scheme included in the HTTP protocol. The client sends a request with the 'Authorization' header that contains the word Basic followed by a space and a base64-encoded string username:password.
In the context of Ytel's v3 API's you will be using your accountsid and authtoken as the username and password respectively. i.e {ACCOUNTSID:AUTHTOKEN}.
Using base64 encoding accountsid:authtoken to create the 'Authorization' header to use our API's will end up looking like this.
'authorization: Basic YWlvY2o5ODExdTJmLTIzNS00MjVkLWFhOWYtYXNvaWRqMGM4dTo4eTg3YXNkZ3loN2I5MWJoYWpic2Q='
You can base64 encode your Accountsid and Authtoken using a couple different methods. Most programming languages have functions built in for just such a thing. Here are a few examples -
In PHP
$header = "Authorization: Basic " . base64_encode($username . ':' . $password);
In Node
var username = 'Test';
var password = '123';
var auth = 'Basic ' + new Buffer(username + ':' + password).toString('base64');
var header = {'Host': 'www.example.com', 'Authorization': auth};
var request = client.request('GET', '/', header);
In Python
base64string = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username, password)).replace('\n', '')
header = ("Authorization: Basic %s" % base64string)
Those are just a few examples. There are also a couple websites that will do this for you as well.
Ultimately, whats important is base64 encoding your accountsid:authtoken and utilizing that encoded string in your 'Authorization' header for your Ytel v3 API requests.
If you are successful you will receive a '200' HTTP response with your API response.
If you put in the wrong API credentials you will receive a '401' HTTP response with "message":"Invalid authentication credentials" as the body.