API Quickstart

Guru's REST API gives you programmatic access to your team's knowledge: cards, collections, folders, tags, analytics, and more. This page gets you authenticated and making your first call.

Authentication

The API uses HTTP Basic Authentication. To get your credentials, follow the instructions in the Help Center.

There are two types of authentication tokens:

1. User token: read and write access, authorized as a specific user.
2. Collection token: read-only access, scoped to a single collection.

See User Tokens vs Collection Tokens to decide which type fits your project.

API structure

The API follows REST conventions and uses JSON as its data format. The root URL for all endpoints is https://api.getguru.com/api/v1/.

Test your credentials

Put your credentials in environment variables, then call the teams endpoint.

With a user token:

curl -u $GURU_USER:$GURU_TOKEN https://api.getguru.com/api/v1/teams -D -

With a collection token, the username is the collection ID. You can find it by using a user token to get all collections on your team.

curl -u $GURU_COLLECTION_ID:$GURU_TOKEN https://api.getguru.com/api/v1/teams -D -

A successful call returns your Guru team information:

[
  {
    "status": "ACTIVE",
    "id": "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "dateCreated": "2025-01-01T00:00:00.000+0000",
    "name": "My Guru Team"
  }
]

From here, the API Reference documents every endpoint, and Pagination explains how to work through paged results.