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ETAPI (REST API)

ETAPI is Trilium's public/external REST API. It is available since Trilium v0.50.

The documentation is in OpenAPI format, available here.

API clients#

As an alternative to calling the API directly, there are client libraries to simplify this

  • trilium-py, you can use Python to communicate with Trilium.

Obtaining a token#

All operations with the REST API have to be authenticated using a token. You can get this token either from Options -> ETAPI or programmatically using the /auth/login REST call (see the spec).

Authentication#

Via the Authorization header#

GET https://myserver.com/etapi/app-info
Authorization: ETAPITOKEN

where ETAPITOKEN is the token obtained in the previous step.

For compatibility with various tools, it's also possible to specify the value of the Authorization header in the format Bearer ETAPITOKEN (since 0.93.0).

Basic authentication#

Since v0.56 you can also use basic auth format:

GET https://myserver.com/etapi/app-info
Authorization: Basic BATOKEN
  • Where BATOKEN = BASE64(username + ':' + password) - this is a standard Basic Auth serialization
  • Where username is "etapi"
  • And password is the generated ETAPI token described above.

Basic Auth is meant to be used with tools which support only basic auth.

Interaction using Bash scripts#

It is possible to write simple Bash scripts to interact with Trilium. As an example, here's how to obtain the HTML content of a note:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Configuration
TOKEN=z1vA4fkGxjOR_ZXLrZeqHEFOv65yV3882iFCRtNIK9k9iWrHliITNSLQ=
SERVER=http://localhost:8080

# Download a note by ID
NOTE_ID="i6ra4ZshJhgN"
curl "$SERVER/etapi/notes/$NOTE_ID/content" -H "Authorization: $TOKEN"

Make sure to replace the values of:

  • TOKEN with your ETAPI token.
  • SERVER with the correct protocol, host name and port to your Trilium instance.
  • NOTE_ID with an existing note ID to download.

As another example, to obtain a .zip export of a note and place it in a directory called out, simply replace the last statement in the script with:

curl -H "Authorization: $TOKEN" \
	-X GET "$SERVER/etapi/notes/$NOTE_ID/export" \
    --output "out/$NOTE_ID.zip"