portainer/api/api-description.md

Portainer API is an HTTP API served by Portainer. It is used by the Portainer UI and everything you can do with the UI can be done using the HTTP API. Examples are available at https://documentation.portainer.io/api/api-examples/ You can find out more about Portainer at http://portainer.io and get some support on Slack.

Authentication

Most of the API environments(endpoints) require to be authenticated as well as some level of authorization to be used. Portainer API uses JSON Web Token to manage authentication and thus requires you to provide a token in the Authorization header of each request with the Bearer authentication mechanism.

Example:

Bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpZCI6MSwidXNlcm5hbWUiOiJhZG1pbiIsInJvbGUiOjEsImV4cCI6MTQ5OTM3NjE1NH0.NJ6vE8FY1WG6jsRQzfMqeatJ4vh2TWAeeYfDhP71YEE

Security

Each API environment(endpoint) has an associated access policy, it is documented in the description of each environment(endpoint).

Different access policies are available:

• Public access
• Authenticated access
• Restricted access
• Administrator access

Public access

No authentication is required to access the environments(endpoints) with this access policy.

Authenticated access

Authentication is required to access the environments(endpoints) with this access policy.

Restricted access

Authentication is required to access the environments(endpoints) with this access policy. Extra-checks might be added to ensure access to the resource is granted. Returned data might also be filtered.

Administrator access

Authentication as well as an administrator role are required to access the environments(endpoints) with this access policy.

Execute Docker requests

Portainer DO NOT expose specific environments(endpoints) to manage your Docker resources (create a container, remove a volume, etc...).

Instead, it acts as a reverse-proxy to the Docker HTTP API. This means that you can execute Docker requests via the Portainer HTTP API.

To do so, you can use the /endpoints/{id}/docker Portainer API environment(endpoint) (which is not documented below due to Swagger limitations). This environment(endpoint) has a restricted access policy so you still need to be authenticated to be able to query this environment(endpoint). Any query on this environment(endpoint) will be proxied to the Docker API of the associated environment(endpoint) (requests and responses objects are the same as documented in the Docker API).

Private Registry

Using private registry, you will need to pass a based64 encoded JSON string ‘{"registryId":<registryID value>}’ inside the Request Header. The parameter name is "X-Registry-Auth". <registryID value> - The registry ID where the repository was created.

Example:

eyJyZWdpc3RyeUlkIjoxfQ==

NOTE: You can find more information on how to query the Docker API in the Docker official documentation as well as in this Portainer example.