Using the APIs

The Mender server microservices are all accessible using an HTTPS API. These APIs can be used to configure the server (for example, preauthorizing devices) or implementing custom workflows (for example, integrating the Mender server into an existing device management system.) The APIs are documented in API chatper.

There are many ways to interact with Mender's REST APIs and the most common ones are shown below.

Set up mender-cli

mender-cli is a standalone CLI tool that works as a client against the Mender server management APIs in order to make it much easier to interact with the APIs.

It supports use cases for cloud systems, like uploading an Artifact to the Mender server, as well as end user workstation use cases like Remote terminal and Port forward (Troubleshoot add-on required).

Over time the functionality of mender-cli will be extended to simplify the most common use cases for integrating the Mender server into other backend and cloud systems. If you need to cover other use cases today, follow the tutorial for cURL instead.

First download the prebuilt mender-cli Linux binary here.

Then open a terminal in the directory you downloaded mender-cli and run the following commands to log in to your Mender server.

chmod +x mender-cli
./mender-cli login --server https://hosted.mender.io --username myusername@example.com

If the log in succeeds, you should see a message similar to the following:

login successful

You can now use the other options of mender-cli to interact with the APIs. For example, to upload an Artifact you can run the following command:

./mender-cli artifacts --server https://hosted.mender.io upload release_1.mender

Set up shell variables for cURL

There are many ways to call http-based REST APIs, but the most generally available method is the command line utility curl. The jq utility is commonly used to decode JSON messages and display them in human-readable format. REST API responses can contain raw data and must run through a JSON parser (jq).

You can easily get both using:

sudo apt-get install curl jq

Open a terminal, which we will use in the following to call the Mender server's REST APIs. First set a shell variable with the URI of your server:

MENDER_SERVER_URI='https://hosted.mender.io'

Next, set a variable with your user email on the Mender server (replace its content with your user email):

MENDER_SERVER_USER='myusername@example.com'

Now obtain a management API JSON Web Token by using the login API:

JWT=$(curl -X POST -u $MENDER_SERVER_USER $MENDER_SERVER_URI/api/management/v1/useradm/auth/login)

You should now have an API token you can use to call any of the Mender server management APIs in the JWT shell variable.

Verify you can call the APIs

To verify you can call the server APIs, list the users of your Mender server instance:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $JWT" $MENDER_SERVER_URI/api/management/v1/useradm/users | jq '.'

If it succeeds it will return something like the following:

[
    {
        "created_ts": "2018-05-17T18:34:03.164Z",
        "email": "myusername@example.com",
        "id": "316517b2-fa41-4dd5-91e9-3ee7668ed230",
        "updated_ts": "2018-05-17T18:34:03.164Z"
    }
]

If this fails, e.g. returns 401 Authorization Required, make sure that the contents of your JWT and MENDER_SERVER_URI shell variables is correct and re-run the steps above if necessary.