Live Chat
Important: The Zopim Chat REST API at www.zopim.com/api/v2 is being phased out in favor of {subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/chat. Both APIs will be available concurrently until February 28, 2025, allowing customers time to transition at their own pace.
This is the reference documentation for the Zendesk Chat API, which is also known as the Live Chat API.
Zendesk Chat is a live chat solution that helps businesses increase sales conversion by engaging important leads on their websites. It is our goal to help many of these businesses use the Zendesk Chat API (the "API") to automate and enhance their customer support with Zendesk Chat.
Run in Postman
If you use Postman, you can import the Chat Public 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:
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.
Document conventions
Endpoints are documented with the HTTP method for the request and a partial resource identifier. Example:
GET /api/v2/chat/agents
Prepend https://{subdomain}.zendesk.com to the resource identifier to get the full endpoint URL. Example:
https://{subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/chat/agents
For more information on the syntax and style conventions used in the docs, see Documentation conventions in the general API introduction.
Security and authentication
This API is an SSL-only API, regardless of how you may have your account configured. You must be a Zendesk Chat user to make API requests.
To make use of these APIs, you must authenticate with a Chat OAuth token. See also OAuth access token.
OAuth access token
The Zendesk Chat API supports OAuth authorization flows. See OAuth Authentication. In your requests, specify the access token in an Authorization header as follows:
Authorization: Bearer {access_token}
Example:
curl https://{subdomain}.zendesk.com/api/v2/chat/agents/me \-H "Authorization: Bearer gErypPlm4dOVgGRvA1ZzMH5MQ3nLo8bo"
For more information on the authentication required to use the APIs, see Security and authentication.
Rate limiting
Each endpoint in the Chat API is rate limited at 200 requests per minute. The response includes headers indicating the account's current rate limit and the number of requests remaining in the current minute:
X-RateLimit: 200X-RateLimit-Remaining: 199
If the rate limit is exceeded, Zendesk Chat will respond with a HTTP 429 Too Many Requests response code and a body that details the reason for the rate limiter kicking in.
Request format
For general information on requests, see Requests in the general API introduction.
Response format
For information on the HTTP status codes returned by the API, see Response format in the general API introduction.