Certificate Authorization Using the Anaplan API

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caroboyle
caroboyle Member, ALL USERS, Community Member Posts: 5 Master Anaplanner of the Year
in Extensibility
Note: This article is meant to be a guide on converting an existing Anaplan Security Certificate to PEM format for the purpose of testing its functionality via cURL commands. Please work with your developers on any in more depth application of this process. The current Production API version is v1.3.

Using a certificate to authenticate will eliminate the need to update your script when you have to change your Anaplan password. To use a certificate for authentication with the API, it first has to be converted into a Base64 encoded string recognizable by Anaplan. Information on how to obtain a certificate can be found in Anapedia.

This article assumes that you already have a valid certificate tied to your user name.

Steps:

1. To properly convert your Anaplan certificate to be usable with the API, first you will need openssl (https://www.openssl.org/). Once you have that, you will need to convert the certificate to PEM format. The PEM format uses the header and footer lines “-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----“, and “-----END CERTIFICATE-----“.

 

2. If your certificate is not in PEM format, you can convert it to the PEM format using the following OpenSSL command. “certificate-(certnumber).cer” is name of source certificate, and “certtest.pem” is name of target PEM certificate.

                 

openssl x509 -inform der -in certificate-(certnumber).cer -out certtest.pem

 

View the PEM file in a text editor. It should be a Base64 string starting with “-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----“, and ending with “-----END CERTIFICATE-----“.

 

3. View the PEM file to find the CN (Common Name) using the following command:

 

openssl x509 -text -in certtest.pem

 

It should look something like "Subject: CN=(Anaplan login email)". Copy the Anaplan login email.

 

4. Use a Base-64 encoder (e.g. https://www.base64encode.org/ ) to encrypt the CN and PEM string, separated by a colon. For example, paste this in:

 

(Anaplan login email):-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----(PEM certificate contents)-----END CERTIFICATE-----


5. You now have the encrypted string necessary to authenticate API calls. For example, using cURL to GET a list of the Anaplan workspaces for the user that the certificate belongs to:

 

curl -H "Authorization: AnaplanCertificate (encrypted string)" https://api.anaplan.com/1/3/workspaces

 

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