Our ReSTful HTTP cloud computing API allows users to create drives, upload and download drive images, and create and control virtual servers on our infrastructure. You can download our ready-made command line tools, or make direct calls to the API from your own scripts.

We provide ready-made scripts to let you control your cloud computing platform infrastructure without writing any code.

Linux/Unix and Windows Cygwin users should download our simple command line tool , drive upload tool and drive download tool.

Once you have these scripts, in just two commands, you can upload a drive image and boot a server. See below for the full input and output to do exactly this, or head straight to the documentation here.

Worked example – using the tools

Each command corresponds to a single API HTTP GET or POST, with the URL corresponding to the command-line arguments, and the input and output data exactly as seen on the command line here.

1. Set API end-point for your availability zone   For example, if your account is in our London West (lon-b) zone, use api.lon-b.elastichosts.com. Alternatively, you can hard-code the value of EHURI in your local copy of the scripts.

2. Set authentication credentials (from account profile)   Omit the secretkey if you are running on a very old Unix system that leaks the content of your environment to other users via ps e. You will then be interactively prompted for your secret key by curl. Alternatively, you can hard-code the value of EHAUTH in your local copy of the scripts, but make sure they aren’t world-readable!

3. Create drive and upload image   We use the drive upload tool to automatically upload in gzipped chunks.

NOTE: for reference, a more basic upload with the raw API would be:

4. Boot a server from the drive   Boot a server from the drive, with 2000 core MHz and 1024 MB RAM. (Set "persistent false" to make a temporary server that will be destroyed when shut down.)

Using the API

The API is implemented in a ReST style, using the URL to specify an object and an action, HTTP GET to read state and HTTP POST to change state. In the description below, API URLs are relative to the stem https://api-<zone>.elastichosts.com/ where <zone> refers to the availability zone of your Elastichosts account.

Users, drives and servers are identified by UUIDs, which are assigned by our infrastructure and passed as a string in the format XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX.

Authentication

API calls must use HTTP Basic Authentication, specifying the user’s UUID as the username and their secret API key as the password. Both are available from the user’s account profile.

Data formats

The API can be used in either text/plain(default) or application/json modes. You should specify the type of input data with an HTTP Content-Type: header, and request a type for output with an HTTP Accept: header. text/plain is the default if no headers are set.

The API sends or receives one of three types of data, according to the call: