# Mailman 3 Core REST API

Here is extensive documentation on the Mailman Core administrative REST API.

## The REST server

Mailman exposes a REST HTTP server for administrative control.

The server listens for connections on a configurable host name and port.

It is always protected by HTTP basic authentication using a single global user name and password. The credentials are set in the [webservice] section of the configuration using the admin_user and admin_pass properties.

Because the REST server has full administrative access, it should never be exposed to the public internet. By default it only listens to connections on `localhost`. Don’t change this unless you really know what you’re doing. In addition you should set the user name and password to secure values and distribute them to any REST clients with reasonable precautions.

The Mailman major and minor version numbers are in the URL.

You can write your own HTTP clients to speak this API, or you can use the official Python bindings.

## Root URL

In this documentation, we mainly use `http://localhost:9001/3.0/` as the REST root url. Port `9001` is used for unit tests, but for a running system, the port is `8001` unless changed in config.

In the documentation we use `3.0` as the primary API version, but the latest version of the API might be different. You may check the difference of versions in Basic Operation.

The `hostname` and `port` where Mailman’s REST API will be listening can be found by running mailman info command. You can configure that in `mailman.cfg` configuration file.:

    >>> from mailman.testing.documentation import cli
    >>> command = cli('mailman.commands.cli_info.info')

    >>> command('mailman info')
    GNU Mailman 3...
    Python ...
    ...
    config file: .../test.cfg
    db url: ...
    REST root url: http://localhost:9001/3.1/
    REST credentials: restadmin:restpass

## Helpers

There are several Documentation Helpers which are used throughout the Mailman documentation. These include the utilities like `dump_json()`, `dump_msgdata()` and `call_http()`.

These helpers methods are simply meant to simplify the documentation and are hence included in the namespaces without imports. If you are trying out these commands on your local machine, you can replace them with `curl` commands instead.

Note

While the documentation below refers only to `dump_json` calls, other utilities mentioned above will also have similar curl equivalents, albeit without the `| python -m json.tool` part, which is only meant only to pretty print the json response.

For example, call like:

    >>> from mailman.testing.documentation import dump_json
    >>> dump_json('http://localhost:9001/3.1/domains')
    entry 0:
        alias_domain: None
        description: An example domain.
        http_etag: "..."
        mail_host: example.com
        self_link: http://localhost:9001/3.1/domains/example.com
    http_etag: "..."
    start: 0
    total_size: 1

is a `GET` request to the URL specified as the first parameter. An equivalent `curl` command for this would be:

    $ curl --user restadmin:restpass http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains | python -m json.tool
    {
    "entries": [
         {
             "alias_domain": null,
             "description": null,
             "http_etag": "\"75a9858de80b96f525d71157558fff523cb940c3\"",
             "mail_host": "example.com",
             "self_link": "http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains/example.com"
         }
     ],
     "http_etag": "\"33480b0f1e9249f6bbcc2c55a1ffaa33c13d424f\"",
     "start": 0,
     "total_size": 1
     }

Warning

Note that the port used in the above two commands are intentionally different. Documentation uses 9001 to make sure that the doctests do not run against a running instance of Mailman. By Default the REST API is available at 8001 port on the host where Mailman Core is listening.

Note

For authentication, the username & password specified with `--user` is only the default values. Please change them to the appropriate values.

Similarly, when some data is provided, the requests are actually post requests:

    >>> dump_json('http://localhost:9001/3.1/domains', {
    ...           'mail_host': 'lists.example.com',
    ...           })
    content-length: 0
    content-type: application/json
    date: ...
    location: http://localhost:9001/3.1/domains/lists.example.com
     ...

This is equivalent to:

    $ curl --user restadmin:restpass -X POST http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains \
        -d mail_host=lists.example.com
    $ curl --user restadmin:restpass http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains | python -m json.tool
    {
     "entries": [
         {
             "alias_domain": null,
             "description": null,
             "http_etag": "\"75a9858de80b96f525d71157558fff523cb940c3\"",
             "mail_host": "example.com",
             "self_link": "http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains/example.com"
         },
         {
             "alias_domain": null,
             "description": null,
             "http_etag": "\"a13efb90674956b3ed26363705bf966a954f1121\"",
             "mail_host": "lists.example.com",
             "self_link": "http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains/lists.example.com"
         }
     ],
     "http_etag": "\"8c1a1d2664b41673bc61126b99359772ce93cfdb\"",
     "start": 0,
     "total_size": 2
     }

Note

Note that by default, Mailman’s REST API accepts both `application/json` and `application/x-www-form-urlencoded` inputs with `PATCH` and `POST` requests. We are using the latter in the call above, but you can also use JSON inputs if you prefer that.

Pay careful attention to which request type you are using. As a rule of thumb, when you are creating new resources, like a `Domain` resource in the above call you have to use `POST`. However, when updating an existing resource, you’d want to use `PATCH` request. Mailman also support `PUT` requests for updating a resource, but you need to specify all the attributes when updating via a `PUT` request.

## REST API Documentation

- Basic operation
- Collections and Pagination
- REST API helpers
- System configuration
- Domains
- Mailing lists
- Mailing list configuration
- Addresses
- Users
- Membership
- Queues
- Server owners
- Post Moderation
- Preferences
- Subscription moderation
- Templates