API Introduction

CloudAPI exposes a REST API over HTTPS. You can work with the REST API by either calling it directly via tooling you already know about (such as curl, et al), or by using the CloudAPI CLIs and SDKs from Joyent. The node-triton CloudAPI SDK & CLI is available as an npm module, which you can install with:

npm install triton

Alternatively, there is the more stable and feature-complete node-smartdc:

npm install smartdc

Although node-triton has fewer features -- for now -- it will continue to receive the most development effort and future support. node-smartdc is in maintenance.

The rest of this document will show all APIs in terms of both the raw HTTP specification, the CLI commands, and sometimes the node-smartdc SDK.

Issuing Requests

All HTTP calls to CloudAPI must be made over TLS, and requests must carry at least two headers (in addition to standard HTTP headers): Authorization and Api-Version. The details are explained below. In addition to these headers, any requests requiring content must be sent in an acceptable scheme to CloudAPI. Details are also below.

Content-Type

For requests requiring content, you can send parameters encoded with application/json, application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data. Joyent recommends application/json. The value of the Accept header determines the encoding of content returned in responses. CloudAPI supports application/json response encodings only.

For example, all of the following are valid calls:

Query String (on the uri):

POST /my/keys?name=rsa&key=... HTTP/1.1
Host: joyent.com
Authorization: ...
Content-Length: 0

Form encoded in the body:

POST /my/keys HTTP/1.1
Host: joyent.com
Authorization: ...
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 123

name=rsa&key=...

JSON in the body:

POST /my/keys HTTP/1.1
Host: joyent.com
Authorization: ...
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 123

{"name":"rsa","key":"..."}

Authorization

All API calls to CloudAPI require an Authorization header, which supports multiple "schemes". Currently CloudAPI supports only one Authentication mechanism due to PCI compliance restrictions:

  • HTTP Signature Authentication Scheme. This Scheme is outlined in Appendix B.

In order to leverage HTTP Signature Authentication, only RSA signing mechanisms are supported, and your keyId must be equal to the path returned from a ListKeys API call. For example, if your Triton login is demo, and you've uploaded an RSA SSH key with the name foo, an Authorization header would look like:

Authorization: Signature keyId=/demo/keys/foo,algorithm="rsa-sha256" ${Base64(sign($Date))}

The default value to sign for CloudAPI requests is simply the value of the HTTP Date header. For more information on the Date header value, see RFC 2616. All requests to CloudAPI using the Signature authentication scheme must send a Date header. Note that clock skew will be enforced to within 300 seconds (positive or negative) from the value sent.

Full support for the HTTP Signature Authentication scheme is provided in both CloudAPI SDKs; an additional reference implementation for Node.js is available in the npm http-signature module, which you can install with:

npm install http-signature

Using cURL with CloudAPI

Since cURL is commonly used to script requests to web services, here's a simple Bash function you can use to wrap cURL when communicating with CloudAPI:

function cloudapi() {
    local now=$(date -u '+%a, %d %h %Y %H:%M:%S GMT')
    local signature=$(echo -n "$now" | openssl dgst -sha256 -sign ~/.ssh/id_rsa | openssl enc -e -a | tr -d '\n')
    local url="$SDC_URL$1"
    shift

    curl -s -k -i \
        -H 'Accept: application/json' \
        -H "accept-version: ~8" \
        -H "Date: $now" \
        -H "Authorization: Signature keyId=\"/$SDC_ACCOUNT/keys/id_rsa\",algorithm=\"rsa-sha256\" $signature" \
        "$@" "$url"
    echo
}

You may need to alter the path to your SSH key in the above function, as well as the path its public-key is saved under in Triton.

With that function, you could just do:

cloudapi /my/machines

CloudAPI HTTP Responses

CloudAPI returns all response objects as application/json encoded HTTP bodies. In addition to the JSON body, all responses have the following headers:

If there is content, you can expect:

HTTP Status Codes

Your client should check for each of the following status codes from any API request:

Error Responses

In the event of an error, CloudAPI will return a standard JSON error response object in the body with the scheme:

{
  "code": "CODE",
  "message": "human readable string"
}

Where the code element is one of:

Clients are expected to check HTTP status code first, and if it's in the 4xx range, they can leverage the codes above.

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