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API Tokens​A​P​I ​Tokens

This page describes how you can manage API tokens in Kestra.

What is an API token

API tokens are used to authenticate API requests to the Kestra API. You can create an API token for a user or a service account.

Where you can use API tokens

API tokens are used anytime you want to grant programmatic access to the Kestra API. To authenticate your custom API calls, you can pass a bearer token to the request header. For example, you can use API tokens to authenticate with the Kestra API from a CI/CD pipeline, or from a custom application.

Currently, we support API tokens as authentication mechanism for the following services:

  1. GitHub Actions
  2. Terraform Provider
  3. Kestra CLI
  4. Kestra API

How to create an API token

To create an API token, navigate to the Administration section and click on the Service Accounts or Users page, depending on whether you want to create an API token for a service account (bot) or a regular user (human).

Then, go to the API Tokens tab and click on the Create button:

api-token

Fill in the form with the required information including the Name, Description and Max age, and click Generate:

api-token2

Note how you can configure the token to expire after a certain period of time, or to never expire. Also, there is a toggle called Extended that will automatically prolong the token's expiration date by the specified number of days (Max Age) if the token is actively used. That toggle is disabled by default.

Once you confirm the API token creation via the Generate button, the token will be generated and displayed in the UI. Make sure to copy the token and store it in a secure location as it will not be displayed again.

api-token3

How to use an API token in an API request

To authenticate your custom API calls, you can pass a Bearer token to the request's Authorization header. Here is an example that will trigger a flow execution using the Kestra API:

bash
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/api/v1/executions/dev/hello-world \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN"