getting 403 forbidden error

Question

Getting 403 forbidden for below code, though "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1" works in postman

@ComponentScan
@EnableAutoConfiguration
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        RestTemplate rt = new RestTemplate();
        HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
        headers.setAccept(Arrays.asList(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON));
        HttpEntity<String> entity = new HttpEntity<String>("parameters", headers);
        String url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1";
        ResponseEntity<String> res = rt.exchange(url, HttpMethod.GET, entity, String.class);

        System.out.println(res);
    }
}

Error:

23:28:21.447 [main] DEBUG o.s.web.client.RestTemplate - Created GET request for "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1"
23:28:21.452 [main] DEBUG o.s.web.client.RestTemplate - Setting request Accept header to [text/plain, application/json, application/*+json, */*]
23:28:21.452 [main] DEBUG o.s.web.client.RestTemplate - Writing [parameters] using [org.springframework.http.converter.StringHttpMessageConverter@3234e239]
23:28:21.855 [main] WARN  o.s.web.client.RestTemplate - GET request for "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1" resulted in 403 (Forbidden); invoking error handler
Exception in thread "main" org.springframework.web.client.HttpClientErrorException: 403 Forbidden
    at org.springframework.web.client.DefaultResponseErrorHandler.handleError(DefaultResponseErrorHandler.java:91)
    at org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate.handleResponseError(RestTemplate.java:598)
    at org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate.doExecute(RestTemplate.java:556)
    at org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate.execute(RestTemplate.java:512)
    at org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate.exchange(RestTemplate.java:454)
    at restFulWS.Application.main(Application.java:21)

Updated: Header snapshot from postman

Access-Control-Allow-Credentials →true
CF-Cache-Status →HIT
CF-RAY →2cfd2d4919e72dcd-BOM
Cache-Control →public, max-age=14400
Connection →keep-alive
Content-Encoding →gzip
Content-Type →application/json; charset=utf-8
Date →Tue, 09 Aug 2016 18:12:32 GMT
Etag →W/"134-PYMqYXMMQ68yDudiuhsVPg"
Expires →Tue, 09 Aug 2016 22:12:32 GMT
Pragma →no-cache
Server →cloudflare-nginx
Transfer-Encoding →chunked
Vary →Accept-Encoding
Via →1.1 vegur
X-Content-Type-Options →nosniff
X-Powered-By →Express

If someone can suggest, what i need to add in my code

what is your post man header values? or try ResponseEntity res = rt.exchange(url, HttpMethod.POST, entity, String.class); — kuhajeyan, Aug 09 '16 at 18:09
403 Forbidden means your user either doesn't have permissions to do this action or no user has permissions to perform this action. If this is working on `postman` then there is something going wrong when you insert your authentication headers. — Susannah Potts, Aug 09 '16 at 18:11
GET /posts?id=1 HTTP/1.1 Host: jsonplaceholder.typicode.com Cache-Control: no-cache Postman-Token: d96adb00-b143-8674-c32a-1ade941d33ea is from postman — sr7, Aug 09 '16 at 18:13
seems you are sending a token in postman, but not with your code implementation — kuhajeyan, Aug 09 '16 at 18:28
@kuhajeyan `postman-token` is a postman used token that shouldn't affect the `REST` function. It's generated with every postman call. Having used Postman to develop an HTTP java Rest Call, I can verify that it should not be required programatically. — Susannah Potts, Aug 09 '16 at 18:39
@sr7 Try replacing the url you're using: `https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1` with: `https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts?id=1` — Susannah Potts, Aug 09 '16 at 18:43
@SusannahPotts still same error: 00:17:19.472 [main] WARN o.s.web.client.RestTemplate - GET request for (https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts?id=1) resulted in 403 (Forbidden); invoking error handler Exception in thread "main" org.springframework.web.client.HttpClientErrorException: 403 Forbidden — sr7, Aug 09 '16 at 18:48
@sr7 Darn. Well I'm not sure what it is then. You can use postman to generate the code to give you a basis though. Click the `Generate Code` link under `Save` and select `Java OK HTTP` and it will show you, roughly, what the request looks like in Java. — Susannah Potts, Aug 09 '16 at 18:50
surprisingly it worked with different url 00:47:55.907 [main] DEBUG o.s.web.client.RestTemplate - Writing [{"status":"testStatus2"}] as "application/json" using [org.springframework.http.converter.StringHttpMessageConverter@53f65459] 00:47:56.587 [main] DEBUG o.s.web.client.RestTemplate - GET request for "http://data.fcc.gov/api/block/find?latitude=39.9936&longitude=-105.0892&showall=false&format=json" resulted in 200 (OK) 0 — sr7, Aug 09 '16 at 19:21

score 27 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 24 '16 at 15:54

27

Try to add a "User-Agent" header to your request. You can either try to set a custom user agent value or use some value that identifies a Browser like "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36"

@ComponentScan
@EnableAutoConfiguration
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        RestTemplate rt = new RestTemplate();
        HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
        headers.setAccept(Arrays.asList(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON));
        headers.add("user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.99 Safari/537.36");
        HttpEntity<String> entity = new HttpEntity<String>("parameters", headers);
        String url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1";
        ResponseEntity<String> res = rt.exchange(url, HttpMethod.GET, entity, String.class);
        System.out.println(res);
    }
}

edited Nov 24 '16 at 15:54

user3655884

139
1
9

answered Aug 09 '16 at 20:24

P.J.Meisch

18,013
6
50
66

That was brilliant!!! But, why??? Please (PLEASE!), explain. – Almir Campos Jun 05 '18 at 17:55
1

@AlmirCampos: there is no specification for this behaviour, at least I ahve not found any. I think this is an (not really working) attempt to block spidering programs and scrapers from accessing a website, as these programs - at least in earlier times - did not send a user agent header. But as you see, this can easily be overcome and today only is a pita. – P.J.Meisch Jun 06 '18 at 12:11
Awesome @P.J.Meisch. You saved my life. I was stuck on this for more than three days. – Hemant Nagpal Nov 13 '20 at 21:59
it helped me a lot !!! – Viraj Dhamal May 15 '21 at 18:34

getting 403 forbidden error

1 Answers1

Linked