Minimal Basic Authentication Demo. Paste into playground & replace username and password. You must be on GitHub for this to work.

BasicAuthPlaygroundSeed.swift

import Foundation

let username = "username"
let password = "password"

let base = "https://api.github.com"
let user = "\(base)/user"
let url = NSURL(string: user)
let request = NSMutableURLRequest(URL: url!)

let authString = "\(username):\(password)"
let authData = authString.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)
let basic = String(data:authData!.base64EncodedDataWithOptions(NSDataBase64EncodingOptions(rawValue: 0)),
    encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)
request.setValue("Basic \(basic!)", forHTTPHeaderField: "Authorization")

var response : NSURLResponse? = nil
do {
    let data = try NSURLConnection.sendSynchronousRequest(request, returningResponse: &response)
    print(String(data:data, encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding))
}
catch let e {
    print(e)
}