ACS 5.X REST API

For a typical network engineer, reading Cisco's REST API documentation looks really simple. All you need to do is to issue the following CLI command

acs config-web-interface rest enable.

But now what? Where are the examples? Thats easy, all you need to do is to download example code directly from the ACS administration UI. But that code is in Java, and several pages long for each example.

So let me do you a favor and show you how to extract a list of all ACS users without even writing a single line of code:

wget -O user-list.xml --auth-no-challenge --http-user=acs_admin_user --http-password=admin_pass --no-check-certificate https://acs.ip.address.x/Rest/Identity/User 

Few things to notice:

• Its a one line command UNIX command. A windows version can be found here.
• The output is XML file called user-list.xml
• --no-check-certificate is needed because ACS has its own self generated SSL certificate, and wget will fail to authenticate that certificate. This can be changed, but how many are actually using anything else?
• --auth-no-challenge is used because ACS expects to use preemptive authentication.
  

Enjoy!