notice
This is documentation for Rasa Documentation v2.x, which is no longer actively maintained.
For up-to-date documentation, see the latest version (3.x).
Rasa Open Source HTTP API
You can use the HTTP API to interact with a running Rasa Open Source server. With the API, you can train models, send messages, run tests, and more.
Looking for API endpoints?
Check out the API Spec for all of the available endpoints as well as their request and response formats.
Enabling the HTTP API
By default, running a Rasa server does not enable the API endpoints. Interactions
with the bot can happen over the exposed webhooks/<channel>/webhook endpoints.
To enable the API for direct interaction with conversation trackers and other
bot endpoints, add the --enable-api parameter to your run command:
Note that you start the server with an NLU-only model, not all the available endpoints can be called. Some endpoints will return a 409 status code, as a trained dialogue model is needed to process the request.
caution
Make sure to secure your server, either by restricting access to the server (e.g. using firewalls), or by enabling an authentication method. See Security Considerations.
By default, the HTTP server runs as a single process. You can change the number
of worker processes using the SANIC_WORKERS environment variable. It is
recommended that you set the number of workers to the number of available CPU cores
(check out the
Sanic docs
for more details). This will only work in combination with the
RedisLockStore (see Lock Stores.
caution
The SocketIO channel does not support multiple worker processes.
Security Considerations
We recommend to not expose the Rasa Server to the outside world, but rather connect to it from your backend over a private connection (e.g. between docker containers).
Nevertheless, there are two authentication methods built in:
Token Based Auth
Pass in the token using --auth-token thisismysecret when starting
the server:
Your requests should pass the token, in our case thisismysecret,
as a parameter:
JWT Based Auth
Enable JWT based authentication using --jwt-secret thisismysecret.
Requests to the server need to contain a valid JWT token in
the Authorization header that is signed using this secret
and the HS256 algorithm.
The token's payload must contain an object under the user key,
which in turn must contain the username and role attributes.
If the role is admin, all endpoints are accessible.
If the role is user, endpoints with a sender_id parameter are only accessible
if the sender_id matches the payload's username property.
Your requests should have set a proper JWT header:
The following is an example payload for a JWT token:
To create and encode the token, you can use tools such as the JWT Debugger, or a Python module such as PyJWT.