I’m currently developing an application that uses Discourse only as an API. The new feature relates to PMs, where we’re using private_messages. The issue here is that we need to receive updates from these private topics (private_messages) through the MessageBus, and currently our authentication method with Username: user.username and Api-Key: admin_api_key doesn’t work exclusively for this case of MessageBus and private topics; it works for everything else. So we need a way to obtain and inject cookies into our frontend when calling the MessageBus, or to create a ‘user-api-key’ and user instead of the api-key. But we need to do this only via API, since our backend will communicate with the Discourse backend and provision everything. The frontend will only be responsible for receiving the cookie or user-api-key and adding it to the MessageBus request.

[image] Alexandre_Gurgel1: DMs I assume tbis is a typo and you’re referring to PMs? DMs are related to #chat.

[image] Alexandre_Gurgel1: I’m currently developing an application that uses Discourse only as an API. Oh cool! [image] Alexandre_Gurgel1: But we need to do this only via API There’s no HTTP API endpoint for creating UserApiKey objects for other users. The /user-api-key endpoint only creates keys for the logged-in user Using MessageBus would be handy, but I’m not sure how to get around the authentication issues. You might need to do polling and/or rely on webhooks for when PMs are updated.

How can I obtain cookies for a user or a 'user-api-key' without requiring user interaction or browser redirects?

Development

Alexandre_Gurgel1 (Alexandre Gurgel) November 26, 2025, 4:00pm 4

Yeah! The topics with archtype: private_message

Topic		Replies	Views
Create apikey for user programmatically as admin Development rest-api	8	2236	February 26, 2024
Generating and retrieving user API keys Development	0	544	March 2, 2023
Allow API use by regular users, not just admins Development rest-api	6	1642	February 14, 2023
Discourse Login & Registeration Development	4	3773	September 28, 2016
User API keys specification Integrations rest-api , reference	69	38562	September 22, 2025

How can I obtain cookies for a user or a 'user-api-key' without requiring user interaction or browser redirects?

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