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REST APIs

While gRPC provides low latency and excellent scalability, REST APISs provide a more traditional and sometimes simpler integration path. REST is often the choice for web-based applications that do not require real-time communication.

API Formatting Guidelines​

You can find all of our APIs at https://api.vectara.io/<version>/<api-endpoint>

The API endpoints are outlined in the various subsections of this API Reference section. These endpoints are automatically derived from the protobuf definitions and take the same parameters. At a high level, the api-endpoint derives from services.proto specifically, and the API parameters are in other .proto files.

The translation from the protobuf definitions to REST is:

  • The only version currently available is v1.
  • api-endpoint is lowercase and has hyphens. For example, the gRPC call CreateCorpus in services.proto is /create-corpus.
  • API parameters can be sent in either camelCase or lowercase with underscores.
    For example, you could submit either numResults or num_results in the Search API.
  • JSON responses are always returned in camelCase form.

API Authentication​

All Vectara APIs are authenticated. Indexing and Search APIs can be authenticated via API Keys. The Personal API Key enables most Admin actions for creating and deleting corpora, but for deleting accounts and accessing billing data, you need to use OAuth 2.0.

API Playground and OpenAPI Specifications​

You can find up-to-date OpenAPI specifications at https://docs.vectara.com/vectara-oas.yaml. These REST API specifications are automatically derived from the gRPC protobuf definitions as well.

You can use these with tools of your choosing like Insomnia or Postman.

  1. Download the OpenAPI YAML file.
  2. Import the file into Insomonia or Postman.
  3. Start making API calls directly from the tool.

Want to try the REST APIs live in your browser? Head over to our our API Playground and make real-time API calls from your browser.

List of Vectara REST APIs​

Vectara provides the following REST APIs:

Account Admin APIs​

The Compute Account Size API lets you view how much quota you consumed across the entire account.

Authentication APIs​

The Authentication APIs let you manage users and the API keys in your system. The User Admin APIs display corpus access and customer-level authorizations, and also let you perform different user and team management activities:

The API Key Admin APIs help you manage the lifecycle and security of API keys:

Corpus Admin APIs​

The Corpus Admin APIs enable you to programmatically manipulate corpora and perform many operations such as viewing corpus consumption, size, associated API keys, and more:

Document Admin APIs​

The Document Admin APIs let you view Document IDs, metadata, and delete documents from corpora:

Indexing APIs​

Selecting the ideal Indexing API for your application can significantly impact the effectiveness of integrating Vectara’s search functionalities into your application. Vectara provides the following indexing APIs for different scenarios:

Query APIs​

The Query APIs let you define parametres and perform queries against your data:

Chat APIs​

The Chat APIs provide a streamlined solution for integrating chatbot functionalities into domain-specific applications and websites using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG):

note

Not all REST API endpoints have long-form documentation in this API Reference. For example, information about Get Usage Metrics is in the API Playground.