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Version: 1.26-dev

API Usage

Enabling/configuring API access​

By default, ENABLE_SWAGGER is true, and MAX_RESPONSE_ITEMS is set to 50. See Config Cheat Sheet for more information.

Authentication​

Gitea supports these methods of API authentication:

  • HTTP basic authentication
  • token=... parameter in URL query string
  • access_token=... parameter in URL query string
  • Authorization: token ... header in HTTP headers

All of these methods accept the same API key token type. You can better understand this by looking at the code -- as of this writing, Gitea parses queries and headers to find the token in modules/auth/auth.go.

Generating and listing API tokens​

API tokens can be created either in the user interface or via the API. Tokens have by default limited permissions and it is important to create tokens with the correct permissions for your task.

User Interface​

Tokens can be created via the Manage Access Tokens dialog, accessed via User Settings / Applications or via the link gitea-domain.example/user/settings/applications. The interface allows you to create tokens and manage their permissions via the Select permissions sub-menu.

Once created, the token is displayed in a toast message above the Manage Access Tokens dialog. Please note, that you can view this toast only once and it is not possible to redisplay the token for security reasons.

Token API​

A new token can be generated with a POST request to /users/:name/tokens.

Note that /users/:name/tokens is a special endpoint and requires you to authenticate using BasicAuth and a password, as follows:

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name":"test_token","scopes":["read:activitypub","read:issue", "write:misc", "read:notification", "read:organization", "read:package", "read:repository", "read:user"]}' \
-u 'username:password' "https://gitea.your.host/api/v1/users/{username}/tokens"
{"id":1,"name":"test_token","sha1":"9fcb1158165773dd010fca5f0cf7174316c3e37d","token_last_eight":"16c3e37d"}

The sha1 (the token) is only returned once and is not stored in plain-text. It will not be displayed when listing tokens with a GET request; e.g.

$ curl --url https://yourusername:password@gitea.your.host/api/v1/users/<username>/tokens
[{"name":"test","sha1":"","token_last_eight:"........":},{"name":"dev","sha1":"","token_last_eight":"........"}]

By default, this creates a token with very limited permissions. To complete your tasks, your token may require extra permissions. These permissions are created via the json variable scopes, which takes an array of permissions as strings. Eg.: "scopes":["all"]. Possible permissions, as reflected in the user interface are:

  • activitypub
  • admin
  • issue
  • misc
  • notification
  • organization
  • package
  • repository
  • user

Each permission may be set to read or write. write implies both Read & Write. To set permissions you write the permissions string as <read or write>:<permission name>, eg.: write:package or read:notification. A properly formatted API call may look like:

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"name":"test", "scopes":["write:package", "read:notification"]}' -u username:password https://gitea.your.host/api/v1/users/<username>/tokens

Special permissions all may be specified as "scopes":["all"], which sets all permissions to both Read & Write.

To use the API with basic authentication with two factor authentication enabled, you'll need to send an additional header that contains the one time password (6 digitrotating token). An example of the header is X-Gitea-OTP: 123456 where 123456 is where you'd place the code from your authenticator. Here is how the request would look like in curl:

$ curl -H "X-Gitea-OTP: 123456" --url https://yourusername:yourpassword@gitea.your.host/api/v1/users/yourusername/tokens

You can also create an API key token via your Gitea installation's web interface: Settings | Applications | Generate New Token.

OAuth2 Provider​

Access tokens obtained from Gitea's OAuth2 provider are accepted by these methods:

  • Authorization bearer ... header in HTTP headers
  • token=... parameter in URL query string
  • access_token=... parameter in URL query string

More on the Authorization: header​

For historical reasons, Gitea needs the word token included before the API key token in an authorization header, like this:

Authorization: token 65eaa9c8ef52460d22a93307fe0aee76289dc675

In a curl command, for instance, this would look like:

curl "http://localhost:4000/api/v1/repos/test1/test1/issues" \
    -H "accept: application/json" \
    -H "Authorization: token 65eaa9c8ef52460d22a93307fe0aee76289dc675" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{ \"body\": \"testing\", \"title\": \"test 20\"}" -i

As mentioned above, the token used is the same one you would use in the token= string in a GET request.

Pagination​

The API supports pagination. The page and limit parameters are used to specify the page number and the number of items per page. As well, the Link header is returned with the next, previous, and last page links if there are more than one pages. The x-total-count is also returned to indicate the total number of items.

curl -v "http://localhost/api/v1/repos/search?limit=1"
...
< link: <http://localhost/api/v1/repos/search?limit=1&page=2>; rel="next",<http://localhost/api/v1/repos/search?limit=1&page=5252>; rel="last"
...
< x-total-count: 5252

API Guide​

API Reference guide is auto-generated by swagger and available on: https://gitea.your.host/api/swagger or on the Gitea instance

The OpenAPI document is at: https://gitea.your.host/swagger.v1.json

Sudo​

The API allows admin users to sudo API requests as another user. Simply add either a sudo= parameter or Sudo: request header with the username of the user to sudo.

SDKs​