3.8 KiB
GitLab API
All API requests require authentication. You need to pass a private_token
parameter by url or header. If passed as header, the header name must be "PRIVATE-TOKEN" (capital and with dash instead of underscore). You can find or reset your private token in your profile.
If no, or an invalid, private_token
is provided then an error message will be returned with status code 401:
{
"message": "401 Unauthorized"
}
API requests should be prefixed with api
and the API version. The API version is defined in lib/api.rb
.
Example of a valid API request:
GET http://example.com/api/v3/projects?private_token=QVy1PB7sTxfy4pqfZM1U
Example for a valid API request using curl and authentication via header:
curl --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: QVy1PB7sTxfy4pqfZM1U" "http://example.com/api/v3/projects"
The API uses JSON to serialize data. You don't need to specify .json
at the end of API URL.
Status codes
The API is designed to return different status codes according to context and action. In this way
if a request results in an error the caller is able to get insight into what went wrong, e.g.
status code 400 Bad Request
is returned if a required attribute is missing from the request.
The following list gives an overview of how the API functions generally behave.
API request types:
GET
requests access one or more resources and return the result as JSONPOST
requests return201 Created
if the resource is successfully created and return the newly created resource as JSONGET
,PUT
andDELETE
return200 Ok
if the resource is accessed, modified or deleted successfully, the (modified) result is returned as JSONDELETE
requests are designed to be idempotent, meaning a request a resource still returns200 Ok
even it was deleted before or is not available. The reasoning behind it is the user is not really interested if the resource existed before or not.
The following list shows the possible return codes for API requests.
Return values:
200 Ok
- TheGET
,PUT
orDELETE
request was successful, the resource(s) itself is returned as JSON201 Created
- ThePOST
request was successful and the resource is returned as JSON400 Bad Request
- A required attribute of the API request is missing, e.g. the title of an issue is not given401 Unauthorized
- The user is not authenticated, a valid user token is necessary, see above403 Forbidden
- The request is not allowed, e.g. the user is not allowed to delete a project404 Not Found
- A resource could not be accessed, e.g. an ID for a resource could not be found405 Method Not Allowed
- The request is not supported409 Conflict
- A conflicting resource already exists, e.g. creating a project with a name that already exists500 Server Error
- While handling the request something went wrong on the server side
Pagination
When listing resources you can pass the following parameters:
page
(default:1
) - page numberper_page
(default:20
, max:100
) - number of items to list per page