Wagtail API v2 Usage Guide¶

The Wagtail API module exposes a public, read only, JSON-formatted API which can be used by external clients (such as a mobile app) or the site’s frontend.

This document is intended for developers using the API exposed by Wagtail. For documentation on how to enable the API module in your Wagtail site, see Wagtail API v2 Configuration Guide

Contents

Fetching content ¶

To fetch content over the API, perform a GET request against one of the following endpoints:

Pages /api/v2/pages/
Images /api/v2/images/
Documents /api/v2/documents/

Note

The available endpoints and their URLs may vary from site to site, depending on how the API has been configured.

Example response ¶

Each response contains the list of items (items) and the total count (meta.total_count). The total count is irrespective of pagination.

GET /api/v2/endpoint_name/

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": "total number of results"
    },
    "items": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "meta": {
                "type": "app_name.ModelName",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/endpoint_name/1/"
            },
            "field": "value"
        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "meta": {
                "type": "app_name.ModelName",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/endpoint_name/2/"
            },
            "field": "different value"
        }
    ]
}

Custom page fields in the API ¶

Wagtail sites contain many page types, each with their own set of fields. The pages endpoint will only expose the common fields by default (such as title and slug).

To access custom page fields with the API, select the page type with the ?type parameter. This will filter the results to only include pages of that type but will also make all the exported custom fields for that type available in the API.

For example, to access the published_date, body and authors fields on the blog.BlogPage model in the configuration docs:

GET /api/v2/pages/?type=blog.BlogPage&fields=published_date,body,authors(name)

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 10
    },
    "items": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "meta": {
                "type": "blog.BlogPage",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/pages/1/",
                "html_url": "http://www.example.com/blog/my-blog-post/",
                "slug": "my-blog-post",
                "first_published_at": "2016-08-30T16:52:00Z"
            },
            "title": "Test blog post",
            "published_date": "2016-08-30",
            "authors": [
                {
                    "id": 1,
                    "meta": {
                        "type": "blog.BlogPageAuthor",
                    },
                    "name": "Karl Hobley"
                }
            ]
        },

        ...
    ]
}

Note

Only fields that have been explicitly exported by the developer may be used in the API. This is done by adding a api_fields attribute to the page model. You can read about configuration here.

This doesn’t apply to images/documents as there is only one model exposed in those endpoints. But for projects that have customised image/document models, the api_fields attribute can be used to export any custom fields into the API.

Pagination ¶

The number of items in the response can be changed by using the ?limit parameter (default: 20) and the number of items to skip can be changed by using the ?offset parameter.

For example:

GET /api/v2/pages/?offset=20&limit=20

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 50
    },
    "items": [
        pages 20 - 40 will be listed here.
    ]
}

Note

There may be a maximum value for the ?limit parameter. This can be modified in your project settings by setting WAGTAILAPI_LIMIT_MAX to either a number (the new maximum value) or None (which disables maximum value check).

Ordering ¶

The results can be ordered by any field by setting the ?order parameter to the name of the field to order by.

GET /api/v2/pages/?order=title

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 50
    },
    "items": [
        pages will be listed here in ascending title order (a-z)
    ]
}

The results will be ordered in ascending order by default. This can be changed to descending order by prefixing the field name with a - sign.

GET /api/v2/pages/?order=-title

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 50
    },
    "items": [
        pages will be listed here in descending title order (z-a)
    ]
}

Note

Ordering is case-sensitive so lowercase letters are always ordered after uppercase letters when in ascending order.

Multiple ordering ¶

Multiple fields cab be passed into the ?order for consecutive ordering.

GET /api/v2/pages/?order=title,-slug

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 50
    },
    "items": [
        pages will be ordered by title and for all matching titles (a-z), then sorted by slug (z-a).
    ]
}

New in version 5.2.

Random ordering ¶

Passing random into the ?order parameter will make results return in a random order. If there is no caching, each request will return results in a different order.

GET /api/v2/pages/?order=random

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 50
    },
    "items": [
        pages will be listed here in random order
    ]
}

Note

It’s not possible to use ?offset while ordering randomly because consistent random ordering cannot be guaranteed over multiple requests (so requests for subsequent pages may return results that also appeared in previous pages).

Filtering ¶

Any field may be used in an exact match filter. Use the filter name as the parameter and the value to match against.

For example, to find a page with the slug “about”:

GET /api/v2/pages/?slug=about

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 1
    },
    "items": [
        {
            "id": 10,
            "meta": {
                "type": "standard.StandardPage",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/pages/10/",
                "html_url": "http://www.example.com/about/",
                "slug": "about",
                "first_published_at": "2016-08-30T16:52:00Z"
            },
            "title": "About"
        },
    ]
}

Filtering by tree position (pages only)¶

Pages can additionally be filtered by their relation to other pages in the tree.

The ?child_of filter takes the id of a page and filters the list of results to contain only direct children of that page.

For example, this can be useful for constructing the main menu, by passing the id of the homepage to the filter:

GET /api/v2/pages/?child_of=2&show_in_menus=true

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 5
    },
    "items": [
        {
            "id": 3,
            "meta": {
                "type": "blog.BlogIndexPage",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/pages/3/",
                "html_url": "http://www.example.com/blog/",
                "slug": "blog",
                "first_published_at": "2016-09-21T13:54:00Z"
            },
            "title": "About"
        },
        {
            "id": 10,
            "meta": {
                "type": "standard.StandardPage",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/pages/10/",
                "html_url": "http://www.example.com/about/",
                "slug": "about",
                "first_published_at": "2016-08-30T16:52:00Z"
            },
            "title": "About"
        },

        ...
    ]
}

The ?ancestor_of filter takes the id of a page and filters the list to only include ancestors of that page (parent, grandparent etc.) all the way down to the site’s root page.

For example, when combined with the type filter it can be used to find the particular blog.BlogIndexPage a blog.BlogPage belongs to. By itself, it can be used to construct a breadcrumb trail from the current page back to the site’s root page.

The ?descendant_of filter takes the id of a page and filter the list to only include descendants of that page (children, grandchildren etc.).

Filtering pages by site ¶

By default, the API will look for the site based on the hostname of the request. In some cases, you might want to query pages belonging to a different site. The ?site= filter is used to filter the listing to only include pages that belong to a specific site. The filter requires the configured hostname of the site. If you have multiple sites using the same hostname but a different port number, it’s possible to filter by port number using the format hostname:port. For example:

GET /api/v2/pages/?site=demo-site.local
GET /api/v2/pages/?site=demo-site.local:8080

Search ¶

Passing a query to the ?search parameter will perform a full-text search on the results.

The query is split into “terms” (by word boundary), then each term is normalized (lowercased and unaccented).

For example: ?search=James+Joyce

Search operator ¶

The search_operator specifies how multiple terms in the query should be handled. There are two possible values:

and - All terms in the search query (excluding stop words) must exist in each result
or - At least one term in the search query must exist in each result

The or operator is generally better than and as it allows the user to be inexact with their query and the ranking algorithm will make sure that irrelevant results are not returned at the top of the page.

The default search operator depends on whether the search engine being used by the site supports ranking. If it does (Elasticsearch), the operator will default to or. Otherwise (database), it will default to and.

For the same reason, it’s also recommended to use the and operator when using ?search in conjunction with ?order (as this disables ranking).

For example: ?search=James+Joyce&order=-first_published_at&search_operator=and

Special filters for internationalized sites ¶

When WAGTAIL_I18N_ENABLED is set to True (see Enabling internationalisation for more details) two new filters are made available on the pages endpoint.

Filtering pages by locale ¶

The ?locale= filter is used to filter the listing to only include pages in the specified locale. For example:

GET /api/v2/pages/?locale=en-us

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 5
    },
    "items": [
        {
            "id": 10,
            "meta": {
                "type": "standard.StandardPage",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/pages/10/",
                "html_url": "http://www.example.com/usa-page/",
                "slug": "usa-page",
                "first_published_at": "2016-08-30T16:52:00Z",
                "locale": "en-us"
            },
            "title": "American page"
        },

        ...
    ]
}

Getting translations of a page ¶

The ?translation_of filter is used to filter the listing to only include pages that are a translation of the specified page ID. For example:

GET /api/v2/pages/?translation_of=10

HTTP 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "meta": {
        "total_count": 2
    },
    "items": [
        {
            "id": 11,
            "meta": {
                "type": "standard.StandardPage",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/pages/11/",
                "html_url": "http://www.example.com/gb-page/",
                "slug": "gb-page",
                "first_published_at": "2016-08-30T16:52:00Z",
                "locale": "en-gb"
            },
            "title": "British page"
        },
        {
            "id": 12,
            "meta": {
                "type": "standard.StandardPage",
                "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v2/pages/12/",
                "html_url": "http://www.example.com/fr-page/",
                "slug": "fr-page",
                "first_published_at": "2016-08-30T16:52:00Z",
                "locale": "fr"
            },
            "title": "French page"
        },
    ]
}

Fields ¶

By default, only a subset of the available fields are returned in the response. The ?fields parameter can be used to both add additional fields to the response and remove default fields that you know you won’t need.

Additional fields ¶

Additional fields can be added to the response by setting ?fields to a comma-separated list of field names you want to add.

For example, ?fields=body,feed_image will add the body and feed_image fields to the response.

This can also be used across relationships. For example, ?fields=body,feed_image(width,height) will nest the width and height of the image in the response.

All fields ¶

Setting ?fields to an asterisk (*) will add all available fields to the response. This is useful for discovering what fields have been exported.

For example: ?fields=*

Removing fields ¶

Fields you know that you do not need can be removed by prefixing the name with a - and adding it to ?fields.

For example, ?fields=-title,body will remove title and add body.

This can also be used with the asterisk. For example, ?fields=*,-body adds all fields except for body.

Removing all default fields ¶

To specify exactly the fields you need, you can set the first item in fields to an underscore (_) which removes all default fields.

For example, ?fields=_,title will only return the title field.

Detail views ¶

You can retrieve a single object from the API by appending its id to the end of the URL. For example:

Pages /api/v2/pages/1/
Images /api/v2/images/1/
Documents /api/v2/documents/1/

All exported fields will be returned in the response by default. You can use the ?fields parameter to customise which fields are shown.

For example: /api/v2/pages/1/?fields=_,title,body will return just the title and body of the page with the id of 1.

Finding pages by HTML path ¶

You can find an individual page by its HTML path using the /api/v2/pages/find/?html_path=<path> view.

This will return either a 302 redirect response to that page’s detail view, or a 404 not found response.

For example: /api/v2/pages/find/?html_path=/ always redirects to the homepage of the site

Default endpoint fields ¶

Common fields ¶

These fields are returned by every endpoint.

id (number) The unique ID of the object

Note

Except for page types, every other content type has its own id space so you must combine this with the type field in order to get a unique identifier for an object.

type (string) The type of the object in app_label.ModelName format

detail_url (string) The URL of the detail view for the object

Pages ¶

title (string) meta.slug (string) meta.show_in_menus (boolean) meta.seo_title (string) meta.search_description (string) meta.first_published_at (date/time) These values are taken from their corresponding fields on the page

meta.html_url (string) If the site has an HTML frontend that’s generated by Wagtail, this field will be set to the URL of this page

meta.parent Nests some information about the parent page (only available on detail views)

meta.alias_of (dictionary) If the page marked as an alias return original page id and full url

Images ¶

title (string) The value of the image’s title field. Within Wagtail, this is used in the image’s alt HTML attribute.

width (number) height (number) The size of the original image file

meta.tags (list of strings) A list of tags associated with the image

Documents ¶

title (string) The value of the document’s title field

meta.tags (list of strings) A list of tags associated with the document

meta.download_url (string) A URL to the document file

Changes since v1 ¶

Breaking changes ¶

The results list in listing responses has been renamed to items (was previously either pages, images or documents)

Major features ¶

The fields parameter has been improved to allow removing fields, adding all fields and customising nested fields

Minor features ¶

html_url, slug, first_published_at, expires_at and show_in_menus fields have been added to the pages endpoint
download_url field has been added to the documents endpoint
Multiple page types can be specified in type parameter on pages endpoint
true and false may now be used when filtering boolean fields
order can now be used in conjunction with search
search_operator parameter was added