Liveblocks REST API allows developers to interact programmatically with their Liveblocks account and services using HTTP requests. With the API, developers can retrieve, set, and udpate room-related data, users, permissions, schemas, and more. The Liveblocks API is organized around REST.
The API has predictable resource-oriented URLs, accepts form-encoded request bodies, returns JSON-encoded responses, and uses standard HTTP response codes, authentication, and verbs.
To use the API endpoints, you need to add your secret key to the request’s authorization header. Except for the public authorization endpoint.
This endpoint lets your application server (your backend) obtain a token that one of its clients (your frontend) can use to enter a Liveblocks room. You use this endpoint to implement your own application’s custom authentication endpoint. When making this request, you’ll have to use your secret key.
Important: The difference with an ID token is that an access token holds all the permissions, and is the source of truth. With ID tokens, permissions are set in the Liveblocks backend (through REST API calls) and "checked at the door" every time they are used to enter a room.
Note: When using the @liveblocks/node package, you can use Liveblocks.prepareSession in your backend to build this request.
You can pass the property userId in the request’s body. This can be whatever internal identifier you use for your user accounts as long as it uniquely identifies an account. The property userId is used by Liveblocks to calculate your account’s Monthly Active Users. One unique userId corresponds to one MAU.
Additionally, you can set custom metadata to the token, which will be publicly accessible by other clients through the user.info property. This is useful for storing static data like avatar images or the user’s display name.
Lastly, you’ll specify the exact permissions to give to the user using the permissions field. This is done in an object where the keys are room names, or room name patterns (ending in a *), and a list of permissions to assign the user for any room that matches that name exactly (or starts with the pattern’s prefix). For tips, see Manage permissions with access tokens.
Success. Returns an access token that can be used to enter one or more rooms.
This endpoint lets your application server (your backend) obtain a token that one of its clients (your frontend) can use to enter a Liveblocks room. You use this endpoint to implement your own application’s custom authentication endpoint. When using this endpoint to obtain ID tokens, you should manage your permissions by assigning user and/or group permissions to rooms explicitly, see our Manage permissions with ID tokens section.
Important: The difference with an access token is that an ID token doesn’t hold any permissions itself. With ID tokens, permissions are set in the Liveblocks backend (through REST API calls) and "checked at the door" every time they are used to enter a room. With access tokens, all permissions are set in the token itself, and thus controlled from your backend entirely.
Note: When using the @liveblocks/node package, you can use Liveblocks.identifyUser in your backend to build this request.
You can pass the property userId in the request’s body. This can be whatever internal identifier you use for your user accounts as long as it uniquely identifies an account. The property userId is used by Liveblocks to calculate your account’s Monthly Active Users. One unique userId corresponds to one MAU.
If you want to use group permissions, you can also declare which groupIds this user belongs to. The group ID values are yours, but they will have to match the group IDs you assign permissions to when assigning permissions to rooms, see Manage permissions with ID tokens).
Additionally, you can set custom metadata to the token, which will be publicly accessible by other clients through the user.info property. This is useful for storing static data like avatar images or the user’s display name.
Success. Returns an ID token that can be used to enter one or more rooms.
This endpoint returns a list of your rooms. The rooms are returned sorted by creation date, from newest to oldest. You can filter rooms by metadata, users accesses and groups accesses.
There is a pagination system where the next page URL is returned in the response as nextPage.
You can also limit the number of rooms by query.
Filtering by metadata works by giving key values like metadata.color=red. Of course you can combine multiple metadata clauses to refine the response like metadata.color=red&metadata.type=text. Notice here the operator AND is applied between each clauses.
Filtering by groups or userId works by giving a list of groups like groupIds=marketing,GZo7tQ,product or/and a userId like userId=user1.
Notice here the operator OR is applied between each groupIds and the userId.
limit optionalA limit on the number of rooms to be returned. The limit can range between 1 and 100, and defaults to 20.
startingAfter optionalA cursor used for pagination. You get the value from the response of the previous page.
metadata.KEY optionalA filter on metadata. Multiple metadata keys can be used to filter rooms.
userId optionalA filter on users accesses.
groupIds optionalA filter on groups accesses. Multiple groups can be used.
Success. Returns the list of rooms and the next page URL.
This endpoint creates a new room. id and defaultAccesses are required.
defaultAccessess could be [] or ["room:write"] (private or public).metadata could be key/value as string or string[]. metadata supports maximum 50 entries. Key length has a limit of 40 characters maximum. Value length has a limit of 256 characters maximum. metadata is optional field.usersAccesses could be [] or ["room:write"] for every records. usersAccesses can contain 100 ids maximum. Id length has a limit of 40 characters. usersAccesses is optional field.groupsAccesses are optional fields.Success. Returns the created room.
This endpoint returns a room by its ID.
Success. Returns the room.
This endpoint updates specific properties of a room. It’s not necessary to provide the entire room’s information.
Setting a property to null means to delete this property. For example, if you want to remove access to a specific user without losing other users:
{ "usersAccesses": { "john": null } }
defaultAccessess, metadata, usersAccesses, groupsAccesses can be updated.
defaultAccessess could be [] or ["room:write"] (private or public).metadata could be key/value as string or string[]. metadata supports maximum 50 entries. Key length has a limit of 40 characters maximum. Value length has a limit of 256 characters maximum. metadata is optional field.usersAccesses could be [] or ["room:write"] for every records. usersAccesses can contain 100 ids maximum. Id length has a limit of 256 characters. usersAccesses is optional field.groupsAccesses could be [] or ["room:write"] for every records. groupsAccesses can contain 100 ids maximum. Id length has a limit of 256 characters. groupsAccesses is optional field.Success. Returns the updated room.
This endpoint deletes a room. A deleted room is no longer accessible from the API or the dashboard and it cannot be restored.
This endpoint returns a list of users currently present in the requested room. For better performance, we recommand to call this endpoint every 10 seconds maximum. Duplicates can happen if a user is in the requested room with multiple browser tabs opened.
Success. Returns the list of active users for the specified room.
This endpoint enables the broadcast of an event to a room without having to connect to it via the client from @liveblocks/client. It takes any valid JSON as a request body. The connectionId passed to event listeners is -1 when using this API.
roomId requiredID of the room
Returns the contents of the room’s Storage tree.
The default outputted format is called “plain LSON”, which includes information on the Live data structures in the tree. These nodes show up in the output as objects with two properties, for example:
{
"liveblocksType": "LiveObject",
"data": ...
}
If you’re not interested in this information, you can use the simpler ?format=json query param, see below.
roomId requiredID of the room
format optionalUse ?format=json to output a simplified JSON representation of the Storage tree. In that format, each LiveObject and LiveMap will be formatted as a simple JSON object, and each LiveList will be formatted as a simple JSON array. This is a lossy format because information about the original data structures is not retained, but it may be easier to work with.
Success. Returns the room’s Storage as JSON.
This endpoint initializes a room’s Storage. The room must already exist and have an empty Storage. Calling this endpoint will disconnect all users from the room if there are any.
The format of the request body is the same as what’s returned by the get Storage endpoint.
For each Liveblocks data structure that you want to create, you need a JSON element having two properties:
"liveblocksType" => "LiveObject" | "LiveList" | "LiveMap""data" => contains the nested data structures (children) and data.The root’s type can only be LiveObject.
A utility function, toPlainLson is included in @liveblocks/client from 1.0.9 to help convert LiveObject, LiveList, and LiveMap to the structure expected by the endpoint.
Success. The Storage is initialized. Returns the room’s Storage as JSON.
This endpoint deletes all of the room’s Storage data. Calling this endpoint will disconnect all users from the room if there are any.
This endpoint returns a JSON representation of the room’s Yjs document.
roomId requiredformatting optionalIf present, YText will return formatting.
key optionalReturns only a single key’s value, e.g. doc.get(key).toJSON().
type optionalUsed with key to override the inferred type, i.e. "ymap" will return doc.get(key, Y.Map).
Success. Returns the room’s Yjs document as JSON.
This endpoint is used to send a Yjs binary update to the room’s Yjs document. You can use this endpoint to initialize Yjs data for the room or to update the room’s Yjs document. Read the Yjs documentation to learn how to create a binary update.
Success. The given room’s Yjs doc has been updated.
This endpoint returns the room’s Yjs document encoded as a single binary update. This can be used by Y.applyUpdate(responseBody) to get a copy of the document in your backend. See Yjs documentation for more information on working with updates.
roomId requiredThis endpoint creates a new schema which can be referenced later to enforce a room’s Storage data structure. The schema consists of a name (for referencing it), and a body, which specifies the exact allowed shape of data in the room. This body is a multi-line string written in the Liveblocks schema syntax.
Success. Creates the new schema and returns it as JSON.
This endpoint retrieves a schema by its id. The id is a combination of the schema name and version. For example, my-schema@1.
id requiredID of the schema
Success. Found the schema and returns it as JSON.
This endpoint updates the body for the schema. A schema can only be updated if it is not used by any room.
id requiredID of the schema
Success. Updates the new schema and increments the version. The schema body is returned as JSON.
This endpoint deletes a schema by its ID. The ID is a combination of the schema name and version. For example, my-schema@1. A schema can only be deleted if it is not attached to a room.
id requiredID of the schema
This endpoint retrieves the schema attached to a room.
roomId requiredID of the room
Success. Found the schema attached to the room and returns it as JSON.
This endpoint attachs a schema to a room, and instantly enables runtime schema validation for the room. If the current contents of the room’s Storage do not match the schema, attaching will fail and the error message will give details on why the schema failed to attach.
roomId requiredID of the room
Success. Found the schema attached to the room. Returns the schema id as JSON.
This endpoint detaches the schema from a room.
roomId requiredID of the room
This endpoint returns the threads in the requested room.
roomId requiredSuccess. Returns list of threads in a room.
This endpoint returns a thread by its ID.
roomId requiredthreadId requiredSuccess. Returns requested thread.
This endpoint returns a comment by its ID.
roomId requiredthreadId requiredcommentId requiredSuccess. Returns the requested comment.
This endpoint returns the list of thread participants. It is a list of unique user IDs representing all the thread comment authors and mentioned users in comments.
roomId requiredthreadId requiredSuccess. Returns the thread’s participants
Deprecated. Prefer using access tokens or ID tokens instead. Read more in our migration guide.
This endpoint lets your application server (your backend) obtain a token that one of its clients (your frontend) can use to enter a Liveblocks room. You use this endpoint to implement your own application’s custom authentication endpoint. When making this request, you’ll have to use your secret key.
You can pass the property userId in the request’s body. This can be whatever internal identifier you use for your user accounts as long as it uniquely identifies an account. Setting the userId is optional if you want to use public rooms, but it is required to enter a private room (because permissions are assigned to specific user IDs). In case you want to use the group permission system, you can also declare which groupIds this user belongs to.
The property userId is used by Liveblocks to calculate your account’s Monthly Active Users. One unique userId corresponds to one MAU. If you don’t pass a userId, we will create for you a new anonymous userId on each connection, but your MAUs will be higher.
Additionally, you can set custom metadata to the token, which will be publicly accessible by other clients through the user.info property. This is useful for storing static data like avatar images or the user’s display name.
Success. Returns an old-style single-room token.
Deprecated. When you update Liveblocks to 1.2, you no longer need to get a JWT token when using a public key.
This endpoint works with the public key and can be used client side. That means you don’t need to implement a dedicated authorization endpoint server side.
The generated JWT token works only with public room (defaultAccesses: ["room:write"]).
Success. Returns the JWT token.