docs-v2/api-docs

API reference documentation

TL;DR: validate and test your local influxdata/openapi changes

1. After you've edited influxdata/openapi definitions, you need to generate and validate contracts and test the API reference docs. To create a shell alias that does this, open your ~/.profile in an editor and add the following commands to the file:

   export DOCS="$HOME/github/docs-v2"
   alias gsd="cd $HOME/github/openapi && make generate-all && \
              npx oats ./contracts/ref/cloud.yml && npx oats ./contracts/ref/oss.yml && \
              cd $DOCS/api-docs && ./getswagger.sh all -b file:///$HOME/github/openapi && \
              sh ./generate-api-docs.sh"
   

2. To refresh your environment with the ~/.profile changes, enter the following command into your terminal:

   source ~/.profile
   

3. To run the alias, enter the following command into your terminal:

   gsd
   

gsd generates the local contracts in ~/github/openapi, validates them with OATS, bundles and lints them with @redocly/cli, and then generates the HTML with @redocly/cli.

Update API docs for InfluxDB Cloud

1. In your docs-v2 directory, create a branch for your changes--for example:

   cd ~/github/docs-v2
   git fetch -ap
   git checkout -b release/api-cloud origin/master
   

2. Enter the following commands into your terminal to fetch and process the contracts:

   # In your terminal, go to the `docs-v2/api-docs` directory:
   cd ./api-docs
   
   # Fetch the contracts, apply customizations, and bundle.
   sh getswagger.sh cloud
   

3. To generate the HTML files for local testing, follow the instructions to generate API docs locally.

4. To commit your updated spec files, push your branch to influxdata/docs-v2, and create a PR against the master branch.

Update API docs for an InfluxDB OSS release

1. Go into your local influxdata/openapi repo directory--for example:

   cd ~/github/openapi
   

2. Get the SHA for the release commit (or consult Team-Edge if you're not sure)--for example, enter the following command into your terminal to get the latest SHA for contracts/ref/oss.yml :

   git log -n 1 --pretty=format:%h -- contracts/ref/oss.yml
   

3. Copy the SHA from the output and create a git tag by running the following command, replacing [SEMANTIC_VERSION] with the OSS release (for example, 2.3.0) and COMMIT_SHA with the SHA from step 2:

   git tag influxdb-oss-v[SEMANTIC_VERSION] COMMIT_SHA
   

4. Enter the following commands into your terminal to push the new tag to the repo:

   git push --tags
   

5. Enter the following commands into your terminal to update docs-release/influxdb-oss branch to the OSS release commit and rebase the branch to the latest release of InfluxDB OSS, replacing OSS_RELEASE_TAG with the SHA from step 3.

   git checkout docs-release/influxdb-oss
   git rebase -i OSS_RELEASE_TAG
   git push -f origin docs-release/influxdb-oss
   

6. Go into your docs-v2 directory and create a branch for your changes--for example:

   cd ~/github/docs-v2
   git fetch -ap
   git checkout -b release/api-oss origin/master
   

7. In ./api-docs, copy the previous version or create a directory for the new OSS version number--for example:

   # In your terminal, go to the `docs-v2/api-docs` directory:
   cd ./api-docs
   

   If the old version directory contains custom content files (for example, v2.2/content), you'll likely want to copy those for the new version.

   # Copy the old version directory to a directory for the new version:
   cp -r v2.2 v2.3
   

8. In your editor, update custom content files in NEW_VERSION/content.

9. Enter the following commands into your terminal to fetch and process the contracts:

   # Fetch the contracts, apply customizations, and bundle.
   sh getswagger.sh oss
   

10. To generate the HTML files for local testing, follow the instructions to generate API docs locally.

11. To commit your updated spec files, push your branch to influxdata/docs-v2, and create a PR against the master branch.

Update API docs for OSS spec changes between releases

Follow these steps to update OSS API docs between version releases--for example, after revising description fields in influxdata/openapi.

1. Go into your local influxdata/openapi repo directory--for example:

   cd ~/github/openapi
   

2. Enter the following commands into your terminal to checkout docs-release/influxdb-oss branch:

   git fetch -ap
   git checkout -t docs-release/influxdb-oss
   

3. Cherry-pick the commits with the updated description fields, and push the commits to the remote branch, replacing [COMMIT_SHAs] (one or more commit SHAs (space-separated))--for example:

   git cherry-pick [COMMIT_SHAs]
   git push -f origin docs-release/influxdb-oss
   
   

4. Go into your docs-v2 directory and create a branch for your changes--for example:

   cd ~/github/docs-v2
   git fetch -ap
   git checkout -b docs/api-oss origin/master
   

5. Go into ./api-docs directory--for example:

   # In your terminal, go to the `docs-v2/api-docs` directory:
   cd ./api-docs
   

6. Enter the following commands into your terminal to fetch and process the contracts:

   # Fetch the contracts, apply customizations, and bundle.
   sh getswagger.sh oss
   

7. To generate the HTML files for local testing, follow the instructions to generate API docs locally.

8. To commit your updated spec files, push your branch to influxdata/docs-v2, and create a PR against the master branch.

Generate InfluxDB API docs

InfluxData uses Redoc, redoc-cli, and Redocly's OpenApi CLI to generate API documentation from the InfluxDB OpenAPI (aka Swagger) contracts.

To minimize the size of the docs-v2 repository, the generated API documentation HTML is gitignored, therefore not committed to the docs repo. The InfluxDB docs deployment process uses OpenAPI specification files in the api-docs directory to generate version-specific (Cloud, OSS v2.1, OSS v2.0, etc.) API documentation.

Generate API docs locally

Because the API documentation HTML is gitignored, you must manually generate it to view the API docs locally.

The ./generate.sh script uses the Redoc CLI to generate Redocly HTML, Javascript, and CSS for each version of the InfluxDB spec. The script uses npx to download and execute the Redocly CLI.

1. Verify that you have a working npx (it's included with Node.js). In your terminal, run:

   npx --version
   

   If npx returns errors, download and run a recent version of the Node.js installer for your OS.

2. To generate API docs for all InfluxDB versions in ./openapi, enter the following command into your terminal:

   sh generate-api-docs.sh
   

   To save time testing your spec changes, you can pass the -c flag to regenerate HTML for only the OpenAPI files that differ from your master branch.

   sh generate-api-docs.sh -c
   

How we version OpenAPI contracts

The api-docs directory structure versions OpenAPI files using the following pattern:

api-docs/
  |-- cloud/
  │     └── ref.yml
  │     └── swaggerV1Compat.yml
  ├── v2.0/
  │     └── ref.yml
  │     └── swaggerV1Compat.yml
  ├── v2.1/
  │     └── ref.yml
  │     └── swaggerV1Compat.yml
  ├── v2.2/
  │     └── ref.yml
  │     └── swaggerV1Compat.yml
  └── etc...

InfluxDB Cloud version

InfluxDB Cloud releases are frequent and not versioned, so the Cloud API spec isn't versioned. We regenerate API reference docs from influxdata/openapi master branch as features are released.

InfluxDB OSS v2 version

Given that influxdata/openapi master may contain OSS spec changes not implemented in the current OSS release, we (Docs team) maintain a release branch, influxdata/openapi docs-release/influxdb-oss, used to generate OSS reference docs.

How to find the API spec used by an InfluxDB OSS version

influxdata/openapi does not version the InfluxData API. To find the influxdata/openapi commit SHA used in a specific version of InfluxDB OSS, see /scripts/fetch-swagger.sh in influxdata/influxdb--for example, for the influxdata/openapi commit used in OSS v2.2.0, see https://github.com/influxdata/influxdb/blob/v2.2.0/scripts/fetch-swagger.sh#L13=. For convenience, we tag influxdata/influxdb (OSS) release points in influxdata/openapi as influxdb-oss-v[OSS_VERSION]. See https://github.com/influxdata/openapi/tags.

How to use custom OpenAPI spec processing

Generally, you should manage API content in influxdata/openapi. In some cases, however, you may want custom processing (e.g. collecting all Tags) or additional content (e.g. describing the reference documentation) specifically for the docs.

When you run getswagger.sh, it executes @redocly/openapi-cli and the plugins listed in .redocly.yaml. ./openapi/plugins use ./openapi/plugins/decorators to apply custom processing to OpenAPI specs.

.yml files in ./PLATFORM/content define custom content for OpenAPI nodes published in the reference docs. To update the content for those nodes, you only need to update the YAML files. For example, to customize the Info section for the Cloud API reference, edit ./cloud/content/info.yml.

To add new YAML files for other nodes in the contracts, follow these steps:

1. Create your new content file with valid OAS content structure and Markdown.
2. Configure the new content YAML file in ./openapi/content/content.js.
3. Write or update a decorator module for the node and configure the decorator in ./openapi/plugins/docs-plugin.js. See the complete list of OAS v3.0 nodes.

@redocly/cli requires that modules use CommonJS require syntax for imports.

@redocly/cli also provides some built-in decorators that you can configure in .redocly without having to write JavaScript.

How to add tag content or describe a group of paths

Each product has a tags.yml file colocated with its spec that configures tag names, descriptions, vendor extensions, and related links. The post-process-specs.ts script applies these configs to the bundled spec before article generation.

Tag config format (tags.yml)

tags:
  # Operation-backed tag — groups API endpoints
  Write data:
    description: >
      Write time series data to InfluxDB 3 Core in line protocol format using
      the v1, v2, or v3 write endpoints.      
    x-related:
      - title: Write data using HTTP APIs
        href: /influxdb3/core/write-data/http-api/
      - title: Line protocol reference
        href: /influxdb3/core/reference/syntax/line-protocol/

  # Trait tag — supplementary documentation, no operations
  Quick start:
    x-traitTag: true
    description: >
      Get started authenticating, writing, and querying data with the
      InfluxDB 3 Core API.      

  # Rename a tag from the upstream spec
  Cache data:
    rename: Cache distinct values
    description: >
      Query cached distinct values.      

Field reference

Field	Type	Description
description	string	Tag description rendered in the API reference. Use > (folded scalar) for prose, | (literal scalar) for multiline markdown with links or HTML.
x-traitTag	boolean	When true, marks the tag as supplementary documentation — it appears in the sidebar but has no associated operations. Use for tags like Authentication, Quick start, Headers, and API compatibility.
x-related	list	Related documentation links rendered below the tag description. Each item has title (link text) and href (URL path or full URL).
rename	string	Renames the tag in both tags[] and all operation.tags[] references. Use when the upstream tag name is too generic or doesn't match docs conventions.

Tag categories

Operation-backed tags group API endpoints. Every operation in the spec has a tags[] array; each unique tag name becomes a navigation section. These tags need a description and usually x-related links.

Trait tags (x-traitTag: true) are supplementary documentation sections with no operations. They appear in the sidebar as standalone content pages. Common trait tags: Authentication, Quick start, Headers, API compatibility, Common parameters, Response codes, Pagination.

One tag per operation

Assign exactly one tag per operation. Most API documentation UIs don't handle multi-tagged operations well — the operation appears in multiple navigation sections, which is confusing.

Use x-compatibility-version instead of a second tag to mark compatibility endpoints. The build pipeline extracts this vendor extension and renders version badges in the UI.

# Correct — single tag + compatibility marker
/api/v2/write:
  post:
    summary: Write data (v2 compatible)
    x-compatibility-version: v2
    tags:
      - Write

# Wrong — dual-tagged, appears under both Write and v2 Compatibility
/api/v2/write:
  post:
    summary: Write data (v2 compatible)
    tags:
      - v2 Compatibility
      - Write

For operations that belong purely to a compatibility layer (e.g., /api/v2/buckets in a v1 product — no equivalent in the native API), use the compatibility tag as the single tag:

/api/v2/buckets:
  get:
    summary: List buckets (v2 compatible)
    x-compatibility-version: v2
    tags:
      - v2 Compatibility

x-compatibility-version values: v1, v2, or v3. The build pipeline (openapi-paths-to-hugo-data/index.ts) extracts this into compatVersion in the article frontmatter, which templates use to render version badges.

Authentication tags are a special case — they use | (literal scalar) for the description because they contain a markdown list and <!-- ReDoc-Inject: <security-definitions> -->, which renders the API's security scheme definitions inline. Security scheme anchor names vary by product:

Product family	Scheme anchors
v3 (Core, Enterprise, Dedicated, Serverless, Clustered)	TokenAuthentication, BearerAuthentication, BasicAuthentication, QuerystringAuthentication
v2 (Cloud, OSS v2)	TokenAuthentication, BasicAuthentication, QuerystringAuthentication
v1 (OSS v1, Enterprise v1)	BasicAuth, QueryAuth, TokenAuth

Writing tag descriptions

• Start with a verb phrase describing what the endpoints do (e.g., "Create and manage...", "Write time series data...", "Query data...")
• Include the full product name on first reference (e.g., "InfluxDB 3 Core", "InfluxDB Cloud", "InfluxDB Enterprise v1")
• Keep descriptions to 2-3 lines (folded scalar > handles wrapping)
• Don't include documentation links in descriptions — use x-related instead
• For management API tags, don't repeat links that are in the main product's data API tags

Content overlay discovery

The post-processor looks for content files in two locations, in order:

1. Spec directory: {specDir}/content/{file} (e.g., influxdb3/core/content/info.yml)
2. Product directory fallback: {productDir}/content/{file} (e.g., influxdb3/core/content/info.yml)

For products with multiple APIs (e.g., Cloud Dedicated has both data and management APIs), the spec-specific directory takes precedence.

Overlay	Behavior
info.yml	Merges each field into spec.info, preserving fields not in the overlay
servers.yml	Replaces spec.servers entirely
tags.yml	Colocated with spec (not in content/). Renames tags, sets descriptions and x-related

Reviewing tags across products

When editing tags, check consistency across related products:

• Core and Enterprise share the same spec structure — their tags should use parallel descriptions (swap product name only)
• Cloud Dedicated and Clustered share management API tags — keep descriptions and x-related links parallel
• Cloud v2 and OSS v2 share most tags — Cloud omits a few OSS-only tags (Backup, Restore, Scraper Targets) and adds Cloud-only tags (Limits, Usage, Invokable Scripts)
• OSS v1 and Enterprise v1 are similar — Enterprise adds the consistency parameter note in Write and cluster-specific language

Documentation links in OpenAPI specs

Use the /influxdb/version/ placeholder when including InfluxDB links in OpenAPI spec description and summary fields. The build process automatically transforms these placeholders to product-specific paths based on the spec file location.

Writing links

# In api-docs/influxdb3/core/openapi/ref.yml
info:
  description: |
    See [authentication](/influxdb/version/api/authentication/) for details.
    Related: [tokens](/influxdb/version/admin/tokens/)    

After build, these become:

• /influxdb3/core/api/authentication/
• /influxdb3/core/admin/tokens/

How it works

The product path is derived from the spec file location:

• api-docs/influxdb3/core/... → /influxdb3/core
• api-docs/influxdb3/enterprise/... → /influxdb3/enterprise
• api-docs/influxdb/v2/... → /influxdb/v2

Only description and summary fields are transformed. Explicit cross-product links (e.g., /telegraf/v1/plugins/) remain unchanged.

Link validation

Run with the --validate-links flag to check for broken links:

yarn build:api-docs --validate-links

This validates that transformed links point to existing Hugo content files and warns about any broken links.

How to test your spec or API reference changes

You can use getswagger.sh to fetch contracts from any URL. For example, if you've made changes to spec files and generated new contracts in your local openapi repo, run getswagger.sh to fetch and process them.

To fetch contracts from your own openapi repo, pass the -b base_url option and the full path to your openapi directory.

# Use the file:/// protocol to pass your openapi directory.
sh getswagger.sh oss -b file:///Users/me/github/openapi

After you fetch them, run the linter or generate HTML to test your changes before you commit them to influxdata/openapi. By default, getswagger.sh doesn't run the linter when bundling the specs. Manually run the linter rules to get a report of errors and warnings.

npx @redocly/openapi-cli lint v2.1/ref.yml

Configure OpenAPI CLI linting and bundling

The .redoc.yaml configuration file sets options for the @redocly/openapi-cli lint and bundle commands. ./openapi/plugins contains custom InfluxData Docs plugins composed of rules (for validating and linting) and decorators (for customizing). For more configuration options, see @redocly/openapi-cli configuration file documentation.