[Support Guide] Understanding and using Netlify's API

Last reviewed by Netlify Support staff: August 2023

Did you know that Netlify has an extensive public API? Anything that you configure in our Admin UI at https://app.netlify.com is managed using this same API, and you’re welcome to use it to create and configure your site(s) and perform most other operations on your account.

We have an article on API Usage in our official documentation which shows how to do some common tasks like deploying your site and configuring it in great detail. It also talks about your options for authentication (since most endpoints require authentication), and also gives examples of usage with the command line http tool curl, so this article won’t rehash that information.

Some details not covered in that article that will be useful as you explore the API:

  • https://open-api.netlify.com has a fairly thorough list of the available calls but is always a work in progress (it may not be entirely complete; if you notice something missing, please file an issue here), since it has to be manually updated with new and changed endpoints.

  • Be aware of our API rate limits as documented in this article.

  • Unless you get officially branded as a reseller, you cannot manage users, subscriptions or payment methods - those are basically the only things our API does which you cannot do unless your account is configured as reseller.

  • Curious about charging your customers for hosting a site on Netlify? Please contact our sales team to discuss special pricing and ability to manage users and accounts on our platform.

The most important advice I can give you about using our API is to watch how we do it! Our entire admin UI works via this API, so checking to see how we use the API in-app will be the best guide to using every feature. You can use your browser’s developer tools to accomplish this! Note that while our UI uses calls to URLs like https://app.netlify.com/access-control/bb-api/api/v1/..., you’ll want to use the endpoint https://api.netlify.com/api/v1/... instead (the specific methods and endpoints will be the same for each, such as HTTP POST to .../hooks/your-hook-id-here).

While we do try to keep our documentation up to date - you can be sure that what is live in production works today! :slight_smile: . Please be aware that endpoints not documented on https://open-api.netlify.com/ may be subject to change at any time. We will honor the documentation for documented endpoints, and will notify if we deprecate any, but non-documented endpoints are considered internal or work in progress and we reserve the rights to change them without notice. This can also help you understand what the normal "order of operations" is when creating a site - you’ll see the endpoints and HTTP methods used, and discover many of the options you can set.

For an example of how to apply this workflow, you may be interested in checking out this article about linking a repo via the API in which I walk through a more complex process that requires multiple API calls, but which I still “sourced” from watching how our UI does things.
And, please always be sure to exercise great care with handling your API tokens, since they have the same access to all sites and accounts that you do in our admin UI!

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