How to Use Our REST APIs

API is short for 'Application Programming Interface' . An API is a set of rules that lets programs talk to each other, exposing data and functionality across the Internet in a consistent format.

REST stands for 'Representational State Transfer'. This is an architectural pattern that describes how distributed systems can expose a consistent interface. When people use the term 'REST API', they are generally referring to an API accessed using the HTTP protocol at a predefined set of URLs.

These URLs represent various resources — any information or content accessed at that location, which can be returned as JSON, HTML, audio files, or images. Often resources have one or more methods that can be performed on them over HTTP, like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. The action represented by the first and last of these is clear, but POST and PUT have specific meanings. How they are defined is confusing, but the general rule is: use POST to create resources, and PUT to update resources.

Twilio, for example, provides many separate REST APIs for sending text messages, making phone calls, looking up phone numbers, managing your accounts, and a whole lot more. In Twilio's ecosystem, each product is its own API, but you will work with each of them in roughly the same way, whether directly over HTTP or using Twilio's helper libraries for several different programming languages.

Twilio supports HTTP Basic authentication. This allows you to protect the URLs on your web server so that only you and Twilio can access them. In order to authenticate with HTTP, you may provide a username and password with the following URL format:

For HTTP Basic authentication, you will use your Twilio account SID as your username and your auth token as your password:

You can find both your account SID and auth token in the Twilio Console after signing up for a free Twilio trial account.

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