Difference between revisions of "Sudoroom Door Shortcut for iPhone"

The door username and password are not in this guide, and the screenshots are redacted. Please don’t post them on the wiki, in chat, or anywhere public.

Once you’ve built the shortcut, the password is stored in it in readable form. Don’t share the shortcut file (the Share button exports the password along with it). Point people to this guide instead.

When you tap this shortcut, your iPhone sends a short message over the internet to a computer at sudoroom. That message includes your username and password, so the computer knows you’re allowed in. If they check out, the computer then runs the door-opening program with your credentials.

Open Shortcuts, tap + to create a new shortcut, and name it something like “sudoroom Door.” You’ll add four actions, in order. To add an action, tap the search bar at the bottom of the screen and type its name.

Add a Text action. Type the username, a colon, and the password, all on one line with no spaces:

USERNAME:PASSWORD

To add the header, tap Headers, then Add new header. In the value field type Basic and a space, then tap the variable bar above the keyboard and pick b64creds. It should appear as an orange variable bubble, as in the screenshot.

If you type the letters “b64creds” instead of picking the variable, the shortcut sends that literal word as your password and the door won’t open. Look for the orange bubble.

Tap the ▶ play button to test it. If the door responds, you’re done.

Add a Show Result action at the end (see above) and run the shortcut again, then match what you see:

{| class="wikitable"

|-

! What you See !! Likely Cause !! Fix

To rule out your phone entirely, run the curl command from the “How it works” section. Adding -i shows the HTTP status code (200 means success, 401 means bad credentials). If curl works and the shortcut doesn’t, the problem is in the shortcut setup.

The shortcut makes a single HTTPS GET request to a CGI shell script on room.sudoroom.org, authenticated with HTTP Basic Authentication. Basic auth means the client sends a header of the form Authorization: Basic \<base64(user:pass)\> and the web server checks it before running the script.

The shortcut just rebuilds that request by hand, because Shortcuts has no built-in “username/password” option for web requests.

Basic auth always joins the username and password with a single colon before encoding. Any stray space or trailing line break becomes part of the password, and the server will reject it. (This is also why the username itself can’t contain a colon.)

Base64 is a way of rewriting any text using only letters, digits, +, / and =, so it can travel safely inside a web request. It is encoding, not encryption: anyone can decode it instantly. The thing actually protecting your password in transit is HTTPS.

Line Breaks must be None because Shortcuts can otherwise wrap long Base64 output every 64 or 76 characters, and a line break inside an HTTP header breaks the request.

A variable is just a labeled box for a value so you can use it later. This step is technically optional (you could insert Step 2’s output straight into the header), but a named variable makes the shortcut easier to read and to fix.

The URL points to a CGI shell script, a small program on the SudoRoom server that the web server runs when the address is requested. The Authorization header is extra information attached to the request; the word Basic tells the server which login scheme you’re using. Header names and the word “basic” aren’t case-sensitive, so the lowercase version in the screenshot works fine.

The finished header looks like: Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ= (that example decodes to username:password).