Deprecated - Introduction to Crowd Admin REST APIs

Available:

Crowd 2.0 to 2.0.7.

The Crowd 2.0 experimental REST APIs are deprecated

Crowd 2.0 introduced the experimental 'admin' REST APIs, allowing interactions with the Crowd Administration Console. In the upcoming release of Crowd 2.1, we will replace these with a new set of REST APIs for use by applications connecting to Crowd. This JIRA issue has the details - see the description and the comments: CWD-1912. We will be delighted with your feedback on the JIRA issue too.

The REST APIs are for developers who want to integrate Crowd into their application and for administrators who want to script interactions with the Crowd server.

Introduction to Crowd's REST APIs

Crowd's REST APIs provide access to resources (data entities) via URI paths. To use a REST API, your application will make an HTTP request and parse the response. By default, the response format is XML. If you wish, you can request JSON instead of XML. Your methods will be the standard HTTP methods like GET, PUT, POST and DELETE.

Because the REST API is based on open standards, you can use any web development language to access the API.

A typical use case would be to get a list of users in a particular directory, retrieve the details of each user and update the user details where applicable.

Crowd's REST APIs provide the following capabilities:

Retrieve a list of directories.
Retrieve basic directory information for each directory.
List the users in a directory.
Add a user to a directory.
Remove a user from a directory.
Retrieve and update user details.
List the groups in a directory.
Add a group to a directory.
Remove a group from a directory.
List the groups to which a user belongs.

Getting Started

If you would like to know more about REST in general, start with the Dare Obasanjo's blog post, Explaining REST to Damien Katz.

Then jump right in and try our REST resources:

Read our guide to using the REST APIs.
Find the REST resources you need in our REST resources reference guide.

Advanced Topics

Below are some links to in-depth information on developing REST APIs and plugins:

Developing your own REST APIs for Crowd: Crowd uses the Atlassian REST plugin to implement the Crowd APIs. The REST plugin is bundled with Crowd. You can add your own REST APIs to Crowd by creating a Crowd plugin that includes the REST plugin module.
Understanding the principles behind the Atlassian REST API design: You may be interested in the guidelines followed by the Atlassian developers who are designing REST APIs for Atlassian applications, including the Crowd REST APIs.

Crowd Developer Documentation