Getting Started with the REST API
Call the TalkJS REST API in order to manage messages, conversations and users from your backend. The API is REST-based, using HTTP and JSON. The API only accepts authenticated calls over HTTPS, and uses HTTP status codes for reporting results.
https://api.talkjs.com
Authenticate your account when using this API by including the secret key in the request. You can see your secret API key in the dashboard.
DO NOT send any REST API requests from frontend (public-facing) code. The TalkJS secret key is designed to only be used in secure & controlled environments - If your secret key is exposed third parties could modify your data by making malicious REST API requests.
Authentication is performed with the "Authorization" header. Simply put your private key in the following format:
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY
Only requests with Content-type: application/json
are accepted (except for HTTP GET requests, which have no content).
TalkJS uses HTTP status codes to indicate whether the request was fine or not. TalkJS always returns HTTP status 200 if a request was processed successfully.
Statuses 4xx mean that the user input was not correct, to be more precise:
- 400 means that the arguments passed were not correct
- 401 means that the "Authorization" header with the token was not present or was incorrect.
- 404 means that the resource could not be located.
Very rarely, TalkJS may return status 5xx, indicating that something went wrong on the TalkJS servers. This may indicate a bug in TalkJS, but it might also be unexpected downtime. Treat this as you would a connection error; you can safely retry this operation.
The HTTP status code is the only way to verify whether a call was successful. Do not inspect the response body for determining this!
All API responses are JSON. Even calls that return no data have a {}
response.
Most of our resources have support for "listing". You can list users, conversations or messages. They all share the same response structure and the same arguments. It accepts common parameters like limit
and startingAfter
.
The limit parameter can be added to fetching endpoints to specifcy the number of results that should be returned. e.g. ?limit=20
- When fetching Conversations
limit
must be a number between 1 and 20 (defaults to 10, if not passed). - When fetching Users or Messages
limit
must be a number between 1 and 100 (defaults to 10, if not passed).
startingAfter
is a cursor that is used in pagination. All records are sorted descendigly and startingAfter
indicates an object ID that defines place in the list. For example if you request 10 records and the last record has an ID c10
, you have to pass startingAfter=c10
as an argument in order to get next 10 results.
The response is a json object containing a field called data
that keeps an array of requested resources.
The REST API accepts bursts of up to 530 requests in a short period of time, but generally request rates should not exceed more than 8 requests per second. If the limit is exceeded for a sustained period of time, requests will return a HTTP 429 "Too many requests" response, indicating you need to retry the request later.
Need this limit increasing? Let us know
If your REST requests yield funky errors, try one of these:
Check whether you're sending a "User-Agent" header. Most languages and libraries do this automatically, but some (eg Java) do not. Try setting this header manually. The value does not matter.
Some customers have reported that this happens on outdated cacert
files. Update
your trusted certificates to a later version.