This is the reference documentation for the Zendesk Help Center REST API and the Help Center Templating API. For an introduction to the Templating API, see Help Center Templates. The rest of this introduction concerns the REST API.

Any general mechanisms and conventions, such as pagination and authentication, work as described in the Zendesk API introduction and are considered implied in this text.

Responses are always filtered according to the permissions of the user on whose behalf the API request is made. For example, when the user requests a list of articles in a section, the API returns only the articles the user can view in the help center.

The API works only with help center items. For example, comments can be made on both articles and requests, but the Help Center API only provides access to article comments. This means that an endpoint that returns "all comments made by a user" actually returns "all comments made on help center articles by a user."

If you have multiple brands, you must use the brand-specific subdomain in the API requests. For example, if you have a brand named brand1, a request for information about that brand's help center content might look like https://brand1.zendesk.com/api/v2/help_center/....

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If you use Postman, you can import the Guide JWT API endpoints as a collection into your Postman app, then try out different requests to learn how the API works. Click the following button to get started:

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If you don't use Postman, you can sign up for a free account on the Postman website and download the app. For more information about using Postman with Zendesk APIs, see Exploring Zendesk APIs with Postman.

Download OpenAPI file

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Data types

The following is specific to the Zendesk Help Center API:

  • Zendesk recommends using the string type for ids in Help Center.
  • Locales are returned and passed as strings. Example: 'en-us'.

For more information on data types used in the APIs, see Data types in the general API introduction.

Pagination

The Help Center API supports two methods of paginating through results: cursor pagination and offset pagination. If no pagination method is specified for an endpoint, it only supports offset pagination.

Cursor-based pagination is the preferred method of pagination and is available for most endpoints. Activate cursor pagination by adding the page[size] parameter (e.g. ?page[size]=30) to the API endpoint. For more information, see Using cursor-based pagination in the general API introduction.

Offset pagination is available for backward compatibility and works as described in Using offset pagination in the general API introduction. Zendesk limits the number of pages available with offset pagination to 100 and may further limit this in the future. Most list requests return 30 records per page by default when using offset pagination. You can change the number on a per-request basis by including a per_page parameter in the request's query string. Example: per_page=100. However, you can't exceed 100 records per page for most requests.

Rate limits

The Help Center API follows the Support API's requests-per-minute limits. See Rate limits in the general API introduction. Requests in one API don't count against the rate limit of the other API.