API Documentation

Access

To access 42matters' data through API, you must have an API access token and pass it with every request you make.

To get an API access token, please sign up for a free 42matters account. You can find your API access token on your launchpad after you logged in.

To access file dumps, you need extra credentials. Please consult the file dump documentation for further details.

Quotas

Every account can consume resources up to certain quotas, which is determined by the plan that account subscribes to.

Every API request consume a certain number of hits. Complex requests, like search, consumes more hits than simple requests, like lookup. The number of hits each kind of request consume is displayed at the beginning of the respective documentation.

You can view the daily usage and quota consumption of your account in your account page.

Rate Limits

Rate limits are in place to protect both 42matters and our users from abuse. If a resource allows for 5 requests per second (QPS), then it allows you to make at most 5 requests in that second and every request after those in that second will get an error response.

The rate limits of each kind of request is displayed at the beginning of the respective documentation. Please contact us if you require more throughput.

Error Response

42matters' API uses conventional HTTP response status codes to indicate the success or failure of a request. In general, codes in the 2xx range are signs of success, codes in the 4xx range indicate the client seems to have erred (e.g., a given package name is not valid, too many requests, etc.), and codes in the 5xx range point to an error with 42matters' servers even though the request is probably valid.

The body part of an error response is usually a json object with 3 attributes: statusCode - a repeat of the HTTP status code mentioned above, message - a human readable explanation, and request - the url clients requested.