API Documentation for prospective customers

We’re actively working on building formal documentation for the Looker API to coincide with its evolution out of ‘beta’ status. The formal API doc will reside with our regular Looker product documentation and will be viewable without a Looker instance or login.

In the meantime, you can take a look at the “api-doc” that is hosted by each Looker instance here: https://learn.looker.com:19999/api-docs/index.html

The Looker API-doc service configuration defaults to requiring login credentials, but can be configured in the Looker admin panel to allow the Looker API-doc to be viewed without a login. We’ve set up learn.looker.com to allow public viewing of the API docs.

“Why would you require login to view the API-doc page?” you might ask. Login state on the API-doc page allows you to interact with the Looker API endpoints - fill in parameters, click “Try It Out!” and see the results of the API call, right there in the browser. Many Looker APIs can modify the Looker instance configuration or return your business data, so the right thing to do is require login to use the API-doc page.

Without a login session (such as on the learn.looker.com link above), you will be able to read the API doc, but you will not be able to invoke the API endpoints interactively.

Keep in mind that the Looker API is currently in ‘beta’ release. That means endpoint URLs, parameters, and result structures may incur breaking changes as we develop and refine the Looker API services. When we are satisfied that a set of APIs are “fully baked” and good for the long haul, we’ll promote them out of beta. Once an endpoint is out of beta, it should not receive any further breaking changes and should be considered a stable foundation upon which to build your applications.

You will probably also be interested in how authentication works with the Looker API. Here’s a writeup that covers our API authentication using OAuth2 tokens: https://github.com/looker/looker-sdk-ruby/blob/master/authentication.md

In browsing around or searching for content related to the Looker API, you may discover material discussing the Looker 1.0 API or authentication requirements. Disregard that material; you should use only API3 for new projects.

Enjoy surfing through the Looker API docs! If you have any questions, feel free to post them here in Discourse.

Thanks,

-Danny