API specification

Basic info about the Provisioning API available operations, endpoints, headers, rate limits, and error handling

Commerce Layer Provisioning API is a fast REST API 100% compliant with the JSON API specification (v1.0). It supports compound documents, sparse fieldsets, resource linking, filtering, sorting, pagination, and more. To learn more about how to leverage those features, the basic CRUD actions syntax and payloads you can refer to the Core API documentation:

• Fetching resources

• Fetching relationships

• Including associations

• Sparse fieldsets

• Sorting results

• Pagination

• Filtering data

• Creating resources

• Updating resources

• Deleting resources

All the strings passed to the API must be UTF-8 encoded.

Base endpoint

All API requests must be made over HTTPS to the following base endpoint:

https://provisioning.commercelayer.io

Headers

Include the following HTTP request headers when making calls to the Provisioning API endpoints:

Header	Required	Details
Accept		Must be application/vnd.api+json.
Accept-Version		Must be v1 (learn more about versioning).
Content-Type		Must be application/vnd.api+json (required only for POST, PUT, and PATCH requests).
Authorization		Must be Bearer {{your_access_token}}.

Where {{your_access_token}} is the access token you get by authenticating to the Provisioning API.

API versioning

The Accept-Version header is optional and will be used to manage future versioning. When different versions of the Provisioning API are available you'll be able to request a specific one just by changing it as follows:

Accept-Version: v{{version}}

Where {{version}} is the unique progressive number that identifies the version you want to use.

The latest version of the Provisioning API is v1 — use v1 as the Accept-Version header to make your calls.

Rate limits

The requests you perform to the Provisioning API are currently subject to the same rate limits as the uncacheable requests to the Core API in live mode and differentiated by limit type.

Limit type	Max number of requests	Time window
Average	200 (to all endpoints)	1 min
Burst	50 (per endpoint)	10 secs

The Core API /oauth/token endpoint you need to use for authentication is subject to stricter limits (max 30 reqs / 1 min).

IP addresses that exceed the rates above will be blocked until the frequency of the specific call drops below the allowed limit.

Errors

Commerce Layer Provisioning API uses HTTP response codes to show the success or failure of an API request.

• Codes in the 2xx range indicate success.

• Codes in the 4xx range indicate an error that failed given the information provided (e.g. bad request, failed validation, or authentication issues).

• Codes in the 5xx range indicate an unhandled error (these are rare and should never happen).

For a complete list of all the possible error codes, messages, and descriptions please refer to the related section of the Core API documentation.

Correct error handling is important. We recommend writing code that gracefully handles all possible API exceptions.