Before you begin working with the Abiquo API, please read Get Started with the Abiquo API, which shows you how to obtain information about your environment's resources and the API by using the Abiquo UI and API together.
To perform tasks using multiple requests using the Abiquo API, work through the API Tutorials section.
This APIExamples section contains reference examples that are also included in each method in the API Reference section.
The example pages are named with the prefix "Ex" and the API methods they illustrate, or with the REST option (e.g. GET) and an abbreviation of the URL of the API resource and method, as well as abbreviated media types and formats.
The simple cURL command examples are provided to help new developers get an overall picture of the Abiquo API. And they also informally document the vital resource links in Abiquo data media types.
These examples are based on the output of the Abiquo integration tests. This means that dummy entities, strange text strings, or empty lists may at times appear in the examples.
For simplicity, user and password authentication is shown in the examples. However, for production systems, OAuth is recommended. See Authentication.
To enable cut and paste to a shell, backslashes are placed at the end of each line to escape the new line. Requests should contain single quotation marks, not back ticks, and every effort has been made to ensure that single quotation marks are used in the cURL commands in the examples, to enable copy and paste where required. However, if problems occur, try checking and modifying the command in a text editor before pasting it in a shell.
You should always use the version number with your media types in requests to the Abiquo API in order to avoid compatibility issues in future versions.
Data payloads
Put and post requests contain a request payload. We have made these payloads visible, rather than using file attachments, because we believe that they can provide useful information about the data entities involved in each query.
To achieve consistency for all request payloads, regardless of their length, we use a data file format in the examples. The cURL command has a -d parameter, which indicates the request payload. The \@ symbol means that the following text is a file name. To run the query, you can create a file with the name requestpayload.<format>, where format could be json, xml, text, etc.
Instead of using a file, you could put the request payload inline. In this case, the easiest approach is to put any authentication line (-u user:password --verbose) above the payload line with a backslash at the end. The payload line should contain -d followed by single quotation marks enclosing the data entity. To ensure JSON compatibility, double quotation marks should be used in JSON strings. You can validate your data entities with JSON or XML formatters or checkers.
Please remember that the example payloads are not specially designed templates for creating a new resource or modifying a resource. For create requests, you may find additional examples of simple requests in the API Reference pages, in the Abiquo API Tutorials, or you may be able to find examples of simple entities by looking at requests made by the Abiquo UI. For modify requests, you should perform a get of an existing object and then make your changes. See also Get Started with the Abiquo API. The Abiquo API will return a response to post requests in the accept media type you specify in your requests. When you use cURL, then the response payload will be raw data. You can then pipe this output to a formatter, such as xmllint, xmlindent or pjson. Or cut and paste to format it in an online tool.
Example cURL command
So here is an example of how a cURL command might look for a test system, where the insecure -k connection is used with https and the request data is inline.
curl -X POST --verbose -k https://my.abiquoserver.com/api/cloud/virtualdatacenters/1/virtualappliances/1/virtualmachines \
-H 'Content-Type: application/vnd.abiquo.virtualmachine+json; version=3.6' \
-H 'Accept: application/vnd.abiquo.virtualmachine+json; version=3.6' \
-u admin:xabiquo \
-d '{"label":"Core_new","links":[{"title":"Core","rel":"virtualmachinetemplate","type":"application/vnd.abiquo.virtualmachinetemplate+json",
"href":"http://example.com/api/admin/enterprises/1/datacenterrepositories/1/virtualmachinetemplates/1"}],"vdrpEnabled":true}' | python -m json.tool