How can I represent 'Authorization: Bearer <token>' in a Swagger Spec (swagger.json)

Maybe this can help:

swagger: '2.0'
info:
  version: 1.0.0
  title: Based on "Basic Auth Example"
  description: >
    An example for how to use Auth with Swagger.

host: basic-auth-server.herokuapp.com
schemes:
  - http
  - https
securityDefinitions:
  Bearer:
    type: apiKey
    name: Authorization
    in: header
paths:
  /:
    get:
      security:
        - Bearer: []
      responses:
        '200':
          description: 'Will send `Authenticated`'
        '403': 
          description: 'You do not have necessary permissions for the resource'

You can copy&paste it out here: http://editor.swagger.io/#/ to check out the results.

There are also several examples in the swagger editor web with more complex security configurations which could help you.

Bearer authentication in OpenAPI 3.0.0

OpenAPI 3.0 now supports Bearer/JWT authentication natively. It's defined like this:

openapi: 3.0.0
...

components:
  securitySchemes:
    bearerAuth:
      type: http
      scheme: bearer
      bearerFormat: JWT  # optional, for documentation purposes only

security:
  - bearerAuth: []

This is supported in Swagger UI 3.4.0+ and Swagger Editor 3.1.12+ (again, for OpenAPI 3.0 specs only!).

UI will display the "Authorize" button, which you can click and enter the bearer token (just the token itself, without the "Bearer " prefix). After that, "try it out" requests will be sent with the Authorization: Bearer xxxxxx header.

Adding Authorization header programmatically (Swagger UI 3.x)

If you use Swagger UI and, for some reason, need to add the Authorization header programmatically instead of having the users click "Authorize" and enter the token, you can use the requestInterceptor. This solution is for Swagger UI 3.x; UI 2.x used a different technique.

// index.html

const ui = SwaggerUIBundle({
  url: "http://your.server.com/swagger.json",
  ...

  requestInterceptor: (req) => {
    req.headers.Authorization = "Bearer xxxxxxx"
    return req
  }
})

Why "Accepted Answer" works... but it wasn't enough for me

This works in the specification. At least swagger-tools (version 0.10.1) validates it as a valid.

But if you are using other tools like swagger-codegen (version 2.1.6) you will find some difficulties, even if the client generated contains the Authentication definition, like this:

this.authentications = {
  'Bearer': {type: 'apiKey', 'in': 'header', name: 'Authorization'}
};

There is no way to pass the token into the header before method(endpoint) is called. Look into this function signature:

this.rootGet = function(callback) { ... }

This means that, I only pass the callback (in other cases query parameters, etc) without a token, which leads to a incorrect build of the request to server.

My alternative

Unfortunately, it's not "pretty" but it works until I get JWT Tokens support on Swagger.

Note: which is being discussed in

• security: add support for Authorization header with Bearer authentication scheme #583
• Extensibility of security definitions? #460

So, it's handle authentication like a standard header. On path object append an header paremeter:

swagger: '2.0'
info:
  version: 1.0.0
  title: Based on "Basic Auth Example"
  description: >
    An example for how to use Auth with Swagger.

host: localhost
schemes:
  - http
  - https
paths:
  /:
    get:
      parameters:
        - 
          name: authorization
          in: header
          type: string
          required: true
      responses:
        '200':
          description: 'Will send `Authenticated`'
        '403': 
          description: 'You do not have necessary permissions for the resource'

This will generate a client with a new parameter on method signature:

this.rootGet = function(authorization, callback) {
  // ...
  var headerParams = {
    'authorization': authorization
  };
  // ...
}

To use this method in the right way, just pass the "full string"

// 'token' and 'cb' comes from elsewhere
var header = 'Bearer ' + token;
sdk.rootGet(header, cb);

And works.