Introduction and Authentication

The LiquidFiles API is a REST based API that uses JSON to interact with it.

With the API, you can send and receive files from other resources and since it's based on current web standards, you can use pretty much any language or any platform, as long as you can make standardised web calls.

Throughout the API documentation, we refer a lot to examples using curl which is a cross platform tool that is easy to add parameters with to test responses from the system. Curl is available on most platforms including Windows at http://curl.haxx.se/download.html.

Authentication

The LiquidFiles API uses http basic authentication using API keys. You can view your API key by looking in your Account page on the LiquidFiles system. You will see something similar to this:

In this case, the users API key is: OhuHzkYns0z2vMsTb7CZhK. To authenticate to the LiquidFiles system, you use the API key as the username. The password doesn't matter. An example with curl would be:

curl -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --user gXvoqaFzd1jYQ9f13sPO06:x https://liquidfiles.example.com/messages/inbox

Curl doesn't allow us to use an empty password so in this case we use the letter 'x' but we could have set anything as the only thing being looked at is the username as the API key. The relative url '/messages/inbox' will list all messages for the user with the API key: gXvoqaFzd1jYQ9f13sPO06.

Please note that the API key is persistent and won't change unless the user (or an admin) resets it.

HTTP Basic Authentication

If you want to manually create your own authentication header, if your language doesn't have support for adding http basic authentication in a simple way, the HTTP Header looks like:

Authorization: Basic Z1h2b3FhRnpkMWpZUTlmMTNzUE8wNjo=

Where Z1h2b3FhRnpkMWpZUTlmMTNzUE8wNjo= is Base64 encoded, created using something like:

Base64(gXvoqaFzd1jYQ9f13sPO06:)

Base64 in this case is a generic function and would need to be replaced by the equivalent command for your programming language of choice. Please note the colon at the end of the API key.

You can also test by entering an API key in the following field:

Resulting Authorization Header

Authorization: Basic Z1h2b3FhRnpkMWpZUTlmMTNzUE8wNjo=

Content-Type and Accept Headers

If you look at the example above again, you will see two headers, Content-Type and Accept:

curl -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --user gXvoqaFzd1jYQ9f13sPO06:x https://liquidfiles.example.com/messages/inbox

• The Accept header tells what you format I want to receive the response in.
• The Content-Type header tells what format you are sending the request data in.

The only supported value for Accept is application/json when using the API. The typical value for Content-Type is also application/json but lets say you're uploading a file "image.gif" then the Content-Type (what you're sending) would be image/gif where's the Accept (how you want this to be processed, or how you want the response) would be application/json.

curl -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: image/gif" --data-binary @image.gif \
  --user gXvoqaFzd1jYQ9f13sPO06:x https://liquidfiles.example.com/message/attachments/upload

As a side note, when the browser is sending the Accept and Content-Type headers set to text/html, this is how LiquidFiles knows to treat the request as a browser HTML session instead of an API session. And given that this is the API section, you need to set both Accept and Content-Type to application/json or the LiquidFiles system won't know to treat this as an API request.

HTTP Verbs

Going back a few years, the entire web used only either GET requests or POST requests and seeing other request types was seen as a potential security problem. With modern REST based standards, this has changed and we now frequently utilise more of the available http verbs at our disposal. These would include:

Response Status Codes

The LiquidFiles appliance will respond with a http status code. The most common status codes would include: