why can't my iphone app connect to my server? - iphone

Question

i have a weird problem. so i've been working on an iphone app where a user can login, and upon logging in, the app would authorize the user by making an http GET request to the server. if the username and password is correct it return an authorization token (typical stuff).
the weird part is that when i test this locally, pointing the http request url to my local machine, it works fine. everything authorizes correctly and all data is returned correctly.
but today, i got the app stable enough that i decided to deploy rest api to my server, but when changed the http request url to my server url, the requests fails.
i thought maybe the server wasn't deployed correctly so i tested the http endpoints with the firefox rest client and everything seems to be working, authorization works, and data gets returned.
does anyone have any thoughts? i'm lost as to what the problem might be.
i'm using AFNetworking library to make the requests.
here's my code:
self.apiHttpClient = [[TKRHttpClient alloc] initWithBaseURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"http://mywebsite.com/api"]];
--------------
NSString *username = [usernameField text];
NSString *password = [passwordField text];
TKRHttpClient *httpClient = [TKRHttpClient sharedInstance];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [httpClient requestWithMethod:#"GET" path:#"/user/auth" parameters:nil];
[request addValue:username forHTTPHeaderField:#"username"];
[request addValue:password forHTTPHeaderField:#"password"];
AFJSONRequestOperation *operation = [AFJSONRequestOperation JSONRequestOperationWithRequest:request success:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, id JSON) {
if(response.statusCode == 200){
NSDictionary * headers = [response allHeaderFields];
NSString *token = [headers objectForKey:#"auth_token"];
NSLog(#"token was %#", token);
[[AppController sharedAppController] initializeDataForUserToken:token];
}else{
NSLog(#"upload failed!");
}
} failure:^(NSURLRequest *request , NSHTTPURLResponse *response , NSError *error , id JSON ) {
NSLog(#"code was: %i", response.statusCode);
if(response.statusCode == 401){
[errorMessage setText:#"Incorrect password or username"];
}
}];
[operation start];
i put in break points, and it seems that the request goes straight to the failure block. the line that says "NSLog(#"code was: %i", response.statusCode);" in the failure block prints out 200. but when i tail the logs on my server, no request was received.
any help would be greatly appreciated. can't figure out for the life of my why it would work against my local tomcat, but won't work when deployed to my server.
thanks in advance!

Answer 1

i found the reason for my problem thanks to #Brad's suggestion.
upon inspecting the request in charles, i found that the request was made as "http://mywebsite.com", then for path it was /user/auth. so the "/api" part was missing.
maybe this is the standard, i don't know, but it appears that AFHTTPClient's (my TKRHttpClient extends AFHTTPClient) initWithBaseURL really means the host URL. the "/api" part gets lopped off.
and the reason why it was working locally is because i deployed the app locally as root, so there was no "/api"
so two ways to fix this. 1. redeploy as app to server as root. or 2. change the line of code from:
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [httpClient requestWithMethod:#"GET" path:#"/user/auth" parameters:nil];
TO:
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [httpClient requestWithMethod:#"GET" path:#"api/user/auth" parameters:nil];
hopefully this helps anyone using AFNetworking in the future.