Making requests to the Notify API via the command line

notify-api.md

Accessing the Notify API from the command line

Prerequisites

• xh
• jwt-cli

Building a bearer token

1. First generate an API key using Notify's admin interface. The API key consists of three parts:

   |--name---| |-----------service uuid-----------| |-----------secret uuid------------|
   yourkeyname-aaaaaaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaa-bbbbbbbb-bbbb-bbbb-bbbb-bbbbbbbbbbbb
   

2. Any generated tokens expire after 30 seconds so we need to generate them per request. The easiest way to do this is to write a small script (e.g., key). We need our service and secret uuids from the API key and be sure to trim the newline from the end.

   jwt encode \
    --iss "aaaaaaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaa" \
    --secret="bbbbbbbb-bbbb-bbbb-bbbb-bbbbbbbbbbbb" \
    --alg=HS256 | tr -d "\n"
   

3. Now we should be able to make it executable chmod +x key and test calling it ./key

Making requests

Now the hard part is done we just need to build requests that use our script:

xh get https://api.notifications.service.gov.uk/v2/templates Authorization:"Bearer $(./key)"