# "401 Unauthorized" despite access token being passed

**URL:** <https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/401-unauthorized-despite-access-token-being-passed/27513>\
**Category:** API\
**Created:** [August 4, 2020, 8:32pm UTC](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/401-unauthorized-despite-access-token-being-passed/27513 "2020-08-04T20:32:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![AlexanderHaffer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8dc957/32.png) [@AlexanderHaffer](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/u/AlexanderHaffer)\
**Post date:** [August 4, 2020, 8:32pm UTC](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/401-unauthorized-despite-access-token-being-passed/27513/1 "2020-08-04T20:32:05Z")

</div>

Hey everyone,

I’m trying to retrieve all videos of a channel through the API. I’m accessing the API with PHP and it’s supposed to be a cron once it works, so I’m using the [OAuth authorization code flow](https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/authentication/getting-tokens-oauth#oauth-authorization-code-flow) to get my access token:

```
$curl = curl_init('https://id.twitch.tv/oauth2/token?client_id='.TWITCH_CLIENT_ID.'&client_secret='.TWITCH_CLIENT_SECRET.'&grant_type=client_credentials');

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$curl_res = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

```

As far as I can tell, the above code is correct, because I get the following response:

```
{
    "access_token" : "abcdefgh12345678",
    "expires_in" : 1234567,
    "token_type" : "bearer"
}

```

I store the access token in TWITCH\_ACCESS\_TOKEN:

```
define('TWITCH_ACCESS_TOKEN', $curl_res['access_token']);

```

And then I do basically the same thing to get the videos (currently with the video-id from the docs to test):

```
$curl = curl_init('https://api.twitch.tv/helix/videos?id=234482848');

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, array(
    'Authorization: Bearer '.TWITCH_ACCESS_TOKEN,
    'Client-ID: '.TWITCH_CLIENT_ID
));

curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$curl_res = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

```

But I only get the following response:

```
{
    "error" : "Unauthorized",
    "status" : 401,
    "message" : "OAuth token is missing"
}

```

To me it sounds like there’s no access token, but I do provide the token (unless the token I receive is wrong?).

Already tried changing the authorization from `Bearer` to `OAuth`, but that didn’t change anything.  
Switching to a `POST` request only made things worse (`404 Not Found` instead of `401 Unauthorized`).

Any ideas? So far I wasn’t able to find anything useful in the docs or in any of the forums I could find. 😕

Thanks,  
Alex

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![AlexanderHaffer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8dc957/32.png) [@AlexanderHaffer](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/u/AlexanderHaffer)\
**Post date:** [August 4, 2020, 9:31pm UTC](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/401-unauthorized-despite-access-token-being-passed/27513/2 "2020-08-04T21:31:01Z")

</div>

Found the fix on [another API-related issue](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/unauthorized-401-client-id-and-oauth-token-do-not-match/27488) and now it works. Thanks to @BarryCarlyon! 🙂

For other people with the same issue:

```
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, array(
    'Authorization: Bearer '.TWITCH_ACCESS_TOKEN,
    'Client-ID: '.TWITCH_CLIENT_ID
));

```

has to be:

```
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Authorization: Bearer '.TWITCH_ACCESS_TOKEN,
    'Client-ID: '.TWITCH_CLIENT_ID
));
```

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://d2opxh93rbxzdn.cloudfront.net/original/2X/0/05909729875cce3b53e59d5561c4d23bb14948fc.png) [@system](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [September 3, 2020, 9:31pm UTC](https://discuss.dev.twitch.com/t/401-unauthorized-despite-access-token-being-passed/27513/3 "2020-09-03T21:31:04Z")

</div>

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