Please view the Discourse API Documentation site for detailed info:
https://docs.discourse.org
API requests must use HTTP header based authentication. Pass your Api-Key and Api-Username as HTTP headers. Authentication via query parameters or request body is not supported (this was removed in April 2020). Please see the example cURL request below.
The only API endpoints that continue to support credentials in query parameters are requests to RSS feeds, the Mail Receiver endpoint, and ICS routes.
The Content-Type can be set to “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”, “multipart/form-data” or “application/json”.
Here is an example POST request via cURL:
curl -X POST "http://127.0.0.1:3000/categories" \
-H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data;" \
-H "Api-Key: 714552c6148e1617aeab526d0606184b94a80ec048fc09894ff1a72b740c5f19" \
-H "Api-Username: discourse1" \
-F "name=89853c20-4409-e91a-a8ea-f6cdff96aaaa" \
-F "color=49d9e9" \
-F "text_color=f0fcfd"
Here is an example of what the API Documentation site looks like:
You can consume the API using cURL commands, but we recommend using the discourse_api gem so that you can use Ruby.
So you want to use Discourse API ? Great! Let’s get started.
Windows , macOS or Ubuntu guide.
Not every endpoint is documented, but you can see an example API request and response for any endpoint by follow this guide:
Discourse is backed by a complete JSON api. Anything you can do on the site you can also do using the JSON api.
The API is documented at docs.discourse.org . You can also use the discourse_api Ruby gem as a client library. However, not every endpoint is documented.
To determine how to do something with the JSON API here are some steps you can follow.
[image]
Open Chrome dev tools, switch to the Network tab, select …
Discourse ships with 3 different global rate limits that can be configured by site admins. For more details about these limits see:
Discourse ships with 3 different global rate limits that can be configured by site admins.
Hi, a quick question: Can you send notifications to users with the API? (or another way).
In the documentation, I found how to GET notifications of the user, how to mark them as read, but not how to POST some. If it isn’t possible, I guess there is always to possibility of using private messages instead.
I would appreciate any input on this. Thanks.
Discourse contains a system for generating API keys per user if a very specific protocol is followed. This feature facilitates “application” access to Discourse instances without needing to involve moderators.
Last Reviewed by @sam on 2026-03-17T17:00:00Z
Authentication
