ETAPI is Trilium's public/external REST API. It is available since Trilium v0.50.

API clients

As an alternative to calling the API directly, there are client libraries to simplify this

• trilium-py, you can use Python to communicate with Trilium.

Obtaining a token

All operations with the REST API have to be authenticated using a token. You can get this token either from Options -> ETAPI or programmatically using the /auth/login REST call (see the spec).

Authentication

Via the Authorization header

GET https://myserver.com/etapi/app-info
Authorization: ETAPITOKEN

where ETAPITOKEN is the token obtained in the previous step.

For compatibility with various tools, it's also possible to specify the value of the Authorization header in the format Bearer ETAPITOKEN (since 0.93.0).

Basic authentication

Since v0.56 you can also use basic auth format:

GET https://myserver.com/etapi/app-info
Authorization: Basic BATOKEN

• Where BATOKEN = BASE64(username + ':' + password) - this is a standard Basic Auth serialization
• Where username is "etapi"
• And password is the generated ETAPI token described above.

Basic Auth is meant to be used with tools which support only basic auth.

Interaction using Bash scripts

It is possible to write simple Bash scripts to interact with Trilium. As an example, here's how to obtain the HTML content of a note:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Configuration
TOKEN=z1vA4fkGxjOR_ZXLrZeqHEFOv65yV3882iFCRtNIK9k9iWrHliITNSLQ=
SERVER=http://localhost:8080

# Download a note by ID
NOTE_ID="i6ra4ZshJhgN"
curl "$SERVER/etapi/notes/$NOTE_ID/content" -H "Authorization: $TOKEN" 

Make sure to replace the values of:

• TOKEN with your ETAPI token.
• SERVER with the correct protocol, host name and port to your Trilium instance.
• NOTE_ID with an existing note ID to download.

As another example, to obtain a .zip export of a note and place it in a directory called out, simply replace the last statement in the script with:

curl -H "Authorization: $TOKEN" \
	-X GET "$SERVER/etapi/notes/$NOTE_ID/export" \
    --output "out/$NOTE_ID.zip"

Uploading binary content

A JSON request body can only carry text, so the content field of POST /etapi/attachments stores exactly the string it receives. To upload an image, a PDF or any other binary file, send the raw bytes to the content endpoint with the application/octet-stream content type. The same applies to the content of a note (PUT /etapi/notes/{noteId}/content).

To attach a file to a note, create the attachment without content, then upload the file to it:

ATTACHMENT_ID=$(curl -s -X POST "$SERVER/etapi/attachments" \
    -H "Authorization: $TOKEN" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "{\"ownerId\": \"$NOTE_ID\", \"role\": \"file\", \"mime\": \"application/pdf\", \"title\": \"report.pdf\", \"position\": 10}" \
    | jq -r .attachmentId)

curl -X PUT "$SERVER/etapi/attachments/$ATTACHMENT_ID/content" \
    -H "Authorization: $TOKEN" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/octet-stream" \
    --data-binary @report.pdf

Use --data-binary rather than -d, which strips line breaks from the file. For an image, set role to image and mime to the image's type, such as image/png.