Headless Restore from XML using cURL

[Bradley Reimers]

I am a developing an automated deploy/test workflow that evaluates various applications (run in docker containers) against our company's internal requirements. 

This workflow is tied to the release page RSS feed, and runs each time a new version of Crowd is available.

Essentially, my requirements are to bypass the setup wizard and have a way to restore from an XML backup without a user ever needing to interact with the UI. 

I have made some progress using cURL, but get a token error on the request and a 'parameter name blocked' warning in the logs.

Anyone done this successfully?

Thank you!

[Dawid Owoc · Accepted solution]

Hello @Bradley Reimers

Making POST requests using curl to automate Crowd's setup flow sounds like a good plan.

The token error you're referring to is most probably atl_token that is normally passed with a form data when you submit a form in each setup step using your web browser. This token prevents XSRF.

In your POST requests from curl, you can disable verification of this token by adding a following header:

X-Atlassian-Token: no-check

Disclaimer: possibility to disable token verification by adding this header does not allow XSRF because browsers do not allow adding additional headers to POST requests which they make when you submit a form. XSRF is also not possible for cross-origin AJAX requests because of CORS.

When comes to parameter name blocked message in the logs, it's not related to the aforementioned XSRF token. This log entry is raised when you make a request which contains a query parameter that does not match a following regular expression:

[a-zA-Z0-9_]+

You shouldn't need to pass such query param. Could you share with us what parameter is causing that? The parameter's key should be visible in the logs.

Here's an example POST request using curl to submit the first setup step (License):

curl -XPOST -H 'X-Atlassian-Token: no-check' --data-urlencode "sid=${SERVER_ID}" --data-urlencode "key=${LICENSE}" 'http://localhost:8095/crowd/console/setup/setuplicense!update.action'

Where:

• ${SERVER_ID} - Crowd's server ID. It can be obtained from ${CROWD_HOME}/shared/crowd.cfg.xml
• ${LICENSE} - your Crowd's license key

Next steps in the setup flow can be submitted analogically.

Best wishes,
Dawid Owoc (Junior Developer at Atlassian)