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Introduction

The idea of this guide is to give you a Hello World moment whereby you’ll start using Kana and walk away with everything you need to successfully use our Admin API. We’ll get you setup and provide simple example code to create something within Kana.

By the end of this guide, you’re going to have:

  1. An API Key

  2. Made a request to our GraphQL API

  3. Created a user

Time to get started 🚀

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Get your API Key

Our Admin API uses Bearer authentication to validate requests - meaning you’ll need an API Key to use as a token within requests.

Where can I get my API Key from?

You can fetch this on the Dashboard via the API page. It’s the one listed under Admin API Key.

This should be provided as an Authorization header within your request - we do not require Bearer to precede the token. It should look something like this:

Authorization: prv_test_4f72905f0c23c0ce0l680cuip07a7c8f1392df72

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Make your first request

For our first request, we’re going to create a user through the Admin API. This API is intended for the backend and uses GraphQL.

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Create a user

Creates a User. A standard GraphQL POST request should use the application/json content type, and include a JSON-encoded body of the following form:

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Body parameters

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query
String
required

The query (as a string) detailing the operation, arguments (defined in the variables), and fields to return. See more in the GraphQL guides.

Returns the User you created. You can therefore specify id, name and email as fields to return in the query.

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variables
String

The arguments for the request which match the fields and types defined in the query. These need to be be a stringified and escaped JSON object. They can also be hardcoded in the query if you’d prefer (making this optional), but they do need to be provided somewhere. See more in the GraphQL guides.

Requires an input variable with the fields from CreateUserInput (ie. id, name, email, etc).

Note that the endpoint for our Admin API is always /graphql, no matter what operation you perform.

Here’s an example of what this request would look like in cURL:

cURL
curl https://api.usekana.com/graphql \\
-X POST \\
-H "Authorization: INSERT_API_KEY" \\
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \\
-d '{ "query": "mutation createUser($input: CreateUserInput!) { createUser(input: $input) { id name email } }", "variables": "{ \\"input\\": { \\"id\\": \\"test\\", \\"name\\": \\"Test User\\", \\"email\\": \\"test@company.com\\"" } }" }'

Now we can do the following:

  1. Copy the above command and paste it in your CLI/Terminal

  2. Replace INSERT_API_KEY with your own Kana API Key

  3. Run the command

When this runs, it should output JSON which looks like this:

Response
{
  "data": {
    "createUser": {
      "id": "test",
      "name": "Test User",
      "email": "test@company.com"
    }
  }
}

This matches the data shape of the query, because GraphQL operations will mirror the order of fields provided within the request in the response - so you’ll always know what to expect.

Congratulations 🎉

You just made a successful call to our GraphQL API and created your first user within Kana!

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Next Steps

You may now want to know a little more about what you just created within Kana, alongside some of the other concepts that make up the fabric of our product. If you’re unfamiliar, then take a look at our Concepts guide:

Kana Concepts

Understand a few of the concepts that make up Kana

If you’re already in the know, then it’s time to dive in deeper by setting up Kana and integrating it within your product. You can either follow our guided walkthrough, or jump straight into our API & SDK documentation:

Guides

How to setup and integrate Kana into your product

Admin API (Backend)

How to use the Admin API

WelcomeKana Concepts