REST

Appwrite supports multiple protocols for accessing the server, including REST, GraphQL, and Realtime. The REST API allows you to access your Appwrite server through HTTP requests without the needing an SDK. Each endpoint in the API represents a specific operation on a specific resource.

Headers

Appwrite's REST APIs expect certain headers to be included with each request:

Authentication

Appwrite supports multiple authentication methods, including account sessions, API keys, and JWTs. The authentication method you use depends on your use case. Below are examples showing how you can authenticate using the REST API.

Client integrations

You can create account sessions with POST requests to the Account API. Sessions are persisted using secured cookies. You can learn more about session persistence in the Authentication Guide.

The example below shows creating an account session with the Create Account Session with Email endpoint.

POST /v1/account/sessions/email HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
X-Appwrite-Project: [PROJECT_ID]

{
  "email": "example@email.com",
  "password": "password"
}

You can find the cookies used to persist the new session in the response headers.

Set-Cookie: a_session_61e71ec784ab035f7259_legacy=eyJ0...aSJ9; expires=Tue, 19-Dec-2023 21:26:51 GMT; path=/; domain=.cloud.appwrite.io; secure; httponly
Set-Cookie: a_session_61e71ec784ab035f7259=eyJ0...aSJ9; expires=Tue, 19-Dec-2023 21:26:51 GMT; path=/; domain=.cloud.appwrite.io; secure; httponly; samesite=None

These cookies are used in subsequent requests to authenticate the user.

GET /v1/account HTTP/1.1
Cookie: a_session_61e71ec784ab035f7259_legacy=eyJ0...aSJ9; a_session_61e71ec784ab035f7259=eyJ0...aSJ9
Content-Type: application/json
X-Appwrite-Project: [PROJECT_ID]

Server integrations

Server integrations use API keys to authenticate and are typically used for backend applications.

Server APIs are authenticated with API keys instead of account sessions. Simply pass an API key in the X-Appwrite-key: [API-KEY] header with the appropriate scopes.

GET /v1/databases/{databaseId}/collections/{collectionId}/documents HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
X-Appwrite-Project: [PROJECT_ID]
X-Appwrite-Key: [API_KEY]

JWT

JWT authentication is frequently used by server applications to act on behalf of a user. Users generate tokens using the Create JWT endpoint. When issuing requests authenticated with a JWT, Appwrite will treat the request like it is from the authenticated user.

GET /v1/account HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
X-Appwrite-Project: [PROJECT_ID]
X-Appwrite-JWT: [TOKEN]

Files

Appwrite implements resumable, chunked uploads for files larger than 5MB. Chunked uploads send files in chunks of 5MB to reduce memory footprint and increase resilience when handling large files. Appwrite SDKs will automatically handle chunked uploads, but it is possible to implement this with the REST API directly.

Upload endpoints in Appwrite, such as [Create File] (/docs/references/cloud/client-web/storage#createFile) and [Create Deployment] (/docs/references/cloud/server-nodejs/functions#createDeployment), are different from other endpoints. These endpoints take multipart form data instead of JSON data. To implement chunked uploads, you will need to implement the following headers. If you wish, this logic is already available in any of the Appwrite SDKs.

The multipart form data is structured as follows:

While cURL and fetch are great tools to explore other REST endpoints, it's impractical to use for chunked file uploads because you need to split files into chunks.

The multipart form data posted to file upload endpoints have the following format:

POST /v1/storage/buckets/default/files HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundarye0m6iNBQNHlzTpVM
X-Appwrite-Project: demo-project
Content-Range: bytes 10485760-12582912/12582912
X-Appwrite-ID: 6369b0bc1dcf4ff59051

------WebKitFormBoundarye0m6iNBQNHlzTpVM
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="fileId"

unique()
------WebKitFormBoundarye0m6iNBQNHlzTpVM
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file"; filename="file.txt"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream

[CHUNKED-DATA]
------WebKitFormBoundarye0m6iNBQNHlzTpVM
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="permissions[]"

read("user:627a958ded6424a98a9f")
------WebKitFormBoundarye0m6iNBQNHlzTpVM--

Images

Some use cases do not allow custom headers, such as embedding images from Appwrite in HTML. In these cases, you can provide the Appwrite project ID using the query parameter project.

<img src="[ENDPOINT]/v1/storage/buckets/[BUCKET_ID]/files/[FILE_ID]/preview?project=[PROJECT_ID]"/>

Permissions

Appwrite SDKs have helpers to generate permission string formats, but when using Appwrite without SDKs, you'd need to create the strings yourself.

Roles

Appwrite SDKs have helpers to generate roles string formats, but when using Appwrite without SDKs, you'd need to create the strings yourself.

Unique ID

Appwrite's SDKs have a helper ID.unique() to generate unique IDs. When using Appwrite without an SDK, pass the string "unique()" into the ID parameter.

Queries

Appwrite's SDKs provide a Query class to generate JSON query strings. When using Appwrite without an SDK, you can template your own JSON strings. You can discover the query methods available in the Queries page.

Query string format

Appwrite Queries are escaped JSON strings, which look like this.

"{\"method\":\"equal\",\"attribute\":\"name\",\"values\":[\"John\"]}"

Query strings are passed to Appwrite using the queries parameter. You can attach multiple query strings by including the array parameter multiple times in the query string: queries[]="..."&queries[]="..."

For example, the unescaped query string might look like this.

?queries[0]={"method":"equal","attribute":"name","values":["John"]}&queries[1]={"method":"limit","values":[6]}

The JSON has a general format like this.

{
  "method": "<QUERY_METHOD>",
  "attribute": "<ATTRIBUTE>",
  "values": [
    <VALUE1>,
    <VALUE2>,
    ...
  ]
}

For example, to query for all documents with the name "John" or "Jane", the query string would look like this.

{
  "method": "equal",
  "attribute": "name",
  "values": [
    "John",
    "Jane"
  ]
}

Here are some more examples of the JSON query format. When in doubt, you can use the Appwrite SDKs to generate the query strings for you.

{
  "method": "isNull",
  "attribute": "name"
}
{
  "method": "select",
  "values": ["name", "age", "email"]
}
{
  "method": "between",
  "attribute": "age",
  "values": [18, 30]
}
{
  "method": "cursorAfter",
  "values": ["documentId"]
}

Query nesting

Some Appwrite query methods, like and and or, allow you to nest queries. When using Appwrite without an SDK, you can template your own JSON strings.

In these cases, attribute is empty and values is an array of queries.

{
  "method": "and",
  "values": [
    {
      "method": "equal",
      "attribute": "name",
      "values": ["John"]
    },
    {
      "method": "between",
      "attribute": "age",
      "values": [20, 30]
    }
  ]
}

Rate limits

Appwrite's REST APIs are protected by the same rate limit policies, just like when using an SDK. Each API has a different rate limit, which is documented in the References section of each service in the Appwrite documentation.

Learn more about Rate Limits.

Specifications

Appwrite provides a full REST API specification in the OpenAPI 3 and Swagger 2 formats every release. These can be accessed through Appwrite's GitHub repository and rendered using a variety of parsers and tools.

Find the REST API specification for your Appwrite version.