Calling the API

After deploying an app, you’ll be able to copy a cURL request to hit the API. In your app dashboard, click Call API.

Here’s what a typical request to a REST API deployed on Beam might look like:

  curl -X POST --compressed "https://apps.beam.cloud/0uc7x" \
   -H 'Accept: */*' \
   -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate' \
   -H 'Authorization: Basic [YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN]' \
   -H 'Connection: keep-alive' \
   -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
   -d '{"text": "This is an example request!"}'

​

Authentication

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API Keys

Your APIs are authenticated through Basic Authentication. This takes the form of a base64-encoded client ID and client secret, joined by a colon:

client_id:client_secret

Your client_id and client_secret can be found in the API Keys section of the dashboard.

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Encoding auth tokens

You can encode the auth tokens yourself, or copy a code-snippet generated for you in the dashboard.

import base64
credential_string = my_client_id + ':' + my_client_secret
auth_token = base64.b64encode(credential_string.encode()).decode()

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Authenticating requests

A proper auth header will look like this:

Authorization: Basic ZGVtbzpwQDU1dzByZA==

And an authenticated cURL request will look something like:

curl -X POST --compressed "https://apps.beam.cloud/kajru" \
   -H 'Authorization: Basic [YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN]'

​

Response codes

Beam uses standard HTTP codes to indicate the success or failure of your requests.

In general, 2xx HTTP codes correspond to success, 4xx codes are for user-related failures, and 5xx codes are for infrastructure issues.

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Custom response codes

You might want to return special status codes from your REST API. Beam supports FastAPI responses, so you can return custom status codes.

For example, you could return a 404 status code with a custom message in your handler function:

from fastapi import FastAPI
from fastapi.responses import JSONResponse

def custom_api_response():
    return JSONResponse(
      status_code=404,
      content={"message": "You need more tokens"}
    )