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Loculus

API overview

Loculus has been designed with an API-first approach: everything that you can do on the website, you can also access through an API.

As shown in the system overview, Loculus consists of several sub-services which have their own APIs. Please note that the API interface has not been finalized yet and may change rapidly until Loculus 1.0 is officially released (see current state and roadmap). In particular, we have plans to unify the APIs more (see GitHub ticket).

Where are the APIs?

You can find the exact API host URLs on the “API Documentation” page of the instance that you are using. There is a link to the page in the footer of the website, you can also find it under <URL of the website>/api-documentation.

Which APIs should you use?

  • Backend: The backend service is the central service. It should be used for data submission and submitting group management and is also the API that the preprocessing pipeline talks to.
  • LAPIS: The LAPIS service contains the released data and should be used to query and download data.
  • Keycloak: The Keycloak service is used for authentication and should be used to obtain authentication tokens and user profile management.