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ArcGIS Enterprise Administrator API

The ArcGIS Enterprise Admin API allows you to perform administrative tasks through resource and operation endpoints. Resources are entities in your deployment that contain information and have a well-defined state. Operations act on these resources and update their information or state. The resources and operations in the Admin API are hierarchical, with each endpoint having a unique URL.

The ArcGIS Enterprise Admin API Directory, which is installed with each instance of ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes, is a simple HTML interface that allows you to interact with the resources and operations exposed by the Admin API.

Get started

The hierarchical root of the ArcGIS Enterprise Admin API beings with a well-defined URL, known as the root URL. This URL is formatted as follows:

https://organization.domain.com/<context>/admin

The various resources and operations that are exposed by the API are organized hierarchically from the root URL. For example, from the root URL, administrators can manage the deployment's organizations, services, uploads, data stores, system configuration, organization logs, and jobs.

To access a resource or invoke an operation, you must do the following to create a request:

  1. Construct a URL to the selected resource or operation as defined in the API reference.
  2. Provide the relevant parameters in their specified format.
  3. Access the URL over the prescribed HTTPS method (either GET or POST).
Note:

If you are not directly interacting with administrative or REST APIs (for example, using scripts or having a web application firewall configured), you may encounter query limitations. When a query string exceeds 2,048 characters in length, submit the query as a POST request.

The API is stateless, which means that ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes does not keep track of transactions from one request to the next. Each request must contain all the information necessary for successful processing, ensuring that each request returns a well-defined response.

API security

The Admin API supports token-based authentication. To use the API, you must provide a token that has been acquired from the Generate Token operation in the Portal Directory (Sharing API), or sign in to the ArcGIS Enterprise Admin API Directory HTML interface of the API as a recognized administrator, which will generate a token that will be stored during the entirety of the session.

Caution:

For security reasons, all POST requests performed from ArcGIS Enterprise Admin API must include a token in the request body. If requests are performed through the HTML interface of the API, the stored token—automatically generated for administrators who sign in through the HTML interface—will be added as a hidden parameter for all POST requests. If you need to generate a token through the Sharing API, that token must be passed as the value for the token parameter in the request.

Due to the sensitive nature of information exchanged between the Admin API and its consumer, only accessing the API over an SSL connection is supported.

Endpoint support

Some endpoints in ArcGIS Enterprise Admin API, though they are present in the UI, are not currently supported. For a list of what is included with this release, see the ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes help or the What's new for ArcGIS Enterprise Administrator API.