Introduction to the REST API

A good way to familiarize yourself with the RavenDB REST API is with the command line tool cURL, which allows you to construct and send individual HTTP requests. You can download cURL from curl.haxx.se (If you're using Linux your CLI may already have cURL installed). You can learn how to use it with the cURL documentation. This page just covers the basics you'll need to interact with RavenDB.

All cURL commands begin with the keyword curl and contain the URL of your RavenDB server or one of its endpoints. This command retrieves the first document from a database named "Demo" located on our public playground server, and prints it in your CLI:

curl http://live-test.ravendb.net/databases/demo/docs?pagesize=1

The other parameters of the HTTP request are specified using 'options'. These are the main cURL options that interest us:

This request uploads a document to a database on the playground server from a local file:

curl -X PUT http://live-test.ravendb.net/databases/demo/docs?id=example -T <path to file>document.txt

In RavenDB all documents have a standard JSON format. In essence, every JSON object is composed of a series of key-value pairs. A document with a complex structure might look something like this:

{
    "<key>": <value>,
    "<key>": "<string value>",
    "an array": [
        <value>,
        "<string value>",
        ...
    ],
    "an object": {
        "<key>": <value>,
        "<key>": "<string value>",
        ...
    },
    ...
}

The whole object is wrapped in curly brackets {}. The <key> is always a string, and the <value> can be a string (denoted by double quotes), a number, a boolean, or null. The value can also be an array of values wrapped in square brackets [], or it can itself be another JSON object wrapped in another pair of curly brackets. Whitespace is completely optional. In the above example and throughout the documentation, JSON is broken into multiple lines for the sake of clarity. When using cURL, the entire command including the request body needs to be on one line.

Sending raw JSON using cURL

Sending raw JSON in the body faces us with a problem: the body itself is wrapped with double quotes ", so the double quotes within the JSON will be interpreted by the parser as the end of the body. The solution is to escape every double quote by putting a backslash \ before it, like this:

-d "{
    \"a string\": \"some text\",
    \"a number\": 42
}"

Binary data

In addition to JSON, pure binary data can be stored as an attachment associated with an existing document. Files can be added to the request with the -T option. Some types of requests, though, allow you to include raw binary in the body - such as the Put Attachment Command.

HTTPS adds public-key encryption on top of standard HTTP to protect information during transit between client and server. It has become increasingly common throughout the internet in recent years. Our setup wizard makes it very simple to set up server secure using a free Let's Encrypt certificate.

To communicate with a secure server over https, you need to specify the paths to the your client certificate and private key files with the --cert and --key options respectively:

curl --cert <path to your certificate file> --key <path to your private key file> "<server url>"

These files can be found in the configuration Zip package you recieved at the end of the setup wizard. You can download this Zip package again by going to this endpoint: <the URL of your server>/admin/debug/cluster-info-package. The certificate and key are found at the root of the package with the names: admin.client.certificate.<your domain name>.crt, and admin.client.certificate.<your domain name>.key respectively.

These are a few of the HTTP status codes we use in our REST API, and what we mean by them: