Get started with the Optimizely Web Experimentation REST API

3 min

This tutorial shows you how to use the Optimizely Web Experimentation API. It demonstrates how to programmatically.

Configure a developer account and obtain an access token.

Use that token to invoke your first REST request.

Generate a token

To use the REST API, you must obtain a token.

Access your developer account at app.optimizely.com. Once logged in, the dashboard displays.

Click Profile.

Select the API Access tab.

Click Generate New Token.

Enter a name for the new token on the popup and click Create. The website redirects to the dashboard.

Copy the token value from the Token column on the dashboard.

Make your first API call

In this section, you invoke the List Projects endpoint to obtain a list of projects.

To use the Optimizely Web Experimentation REST API, you must include a request header called Authorization, set it to specify a Bearer token, and include the access token generated previously.

In the following example, replace PERSONAL_TOKEN with the access token that you generated previously and then execute the command using a terminal window:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer PERSONAL_TOKEN" "https://api.optimizely.com/v2/projects"

The response contains a collection listing all of your projects.

[
  {
    "account_id": 5935064,
    "confidence_threshold": 0.9,
    "created": "2022-01-11T17:19:41.401142Z",
    "description": "",
    "id": 21014920239,
    "is_classic": false,
    "is_flags_enabled": false,
    "last_modified": "2024-01-23T20:17:13.304965Z",
    "name": "Combined Dev Docs",
    "platform": "web",
    "sdks": [],
    "status": "active",
    "web_snippet": {
      "code_revision": 6281,
      "enable_force_variation": false,
      "exclude_disabled_experiments": false,
      "exclude_names": true,
      "include_jquery": false,
      "ip_anonymization": false,
      "js_file_size": 89333,
      "library": "none"
    }
  },
  {
    "account_id": 5935064,
    "confidence_threshold": 0.9,
    "created": "2022-02-10T01:09:22.479578Z",
    "description": "Demo Sandbox Account for web experiments ",
    "id": 21187142045,
    "is_classic": false,
    "is_flags_enabled": false,
    "last_modified": "2024-02-22T20:45:11.048997Z",
    "name": "Attic and Button",
    "platform": "web",
    "sdks": [],
    "status": "active",
    "web_snippet": {
      "code_revision": 75,
      "enable_force_variation": true,
      "exclude_disabled_experiments": false,
      "exclude_names": false,
      "include_jquery": false,
      "ip_anonymization": false,
      "js_file_size": 84966,
      "library": "none"
    }
  },
  {
    "account_id": 5935064,
    "confidence_threshold": 0.9,
    "created": "2022-06-02T13:39:49.328271Z",
    "description": "",
    "id": 21562231775,
    "is_classic": false,
    "is_flags_enabled": false,
    "last_modified": "2024-02-21T12:06:13.433610Z",
    "name": "[Craig] Playground",
    "platform": "web",
    "sdks": [],
    "status": "active",
    "web_snippet": {
      "code_revision": 47,
      "enable_force_variation": false,
      "exclude_disabled_experiments": false,
      "exclude_names": true,
      "include_jquery": false,
      "ip_anonymization": false,
      "js_file_size": 84945,
      "library": "none"
    }
  },
  {
    "account_id": 5935064,
    "confidence_threshold": 0.9,
    "created": "2022-07-12T20:40:05.099614Z",
    "description": "",
    "id": 21770491416,
    "is_classic": false,
    "is_flags_enabled": true,
    "last_modified": "2023-10-17T21:30:09.195688Z",
    "name": "Web Demo",
    "platform": "custom",
    "sdks": [],
    "status": "active"
  },
  {
    "account_id": 5935064,
    "confidence_threshold": 0.9,
    "created": "2024-01-12T22:44:32.576778Z",
    "description": "Personalization campaign for the dev doc site.",
    "id": 27211030214,
    "is_classic": false,
    "is_flags_enabled": false,
    "last_modified": "2024-01-17T06:31:19.988677Z",
    "name": "Personalization",
    "platform": "web",
    "sdks": [],
    "status": "active",
    "web_snippet": {
      "code_revision": 2,
      "enable_force_variation": false,
      "exclude_disabled_experiments": false,
      "exclude_names": true,
      "include_jquery": false,
      "ip_anonymization": false,
      "js_file_size": 85095,
      "library": "none"
    }
  },
  {
    "account_id": 5935064,
    "confidence_threshold": 0.9,
    "created": "2024-01-12T22:41:57.672289Z",
    "description": "",
    "id": 27216770080,
    "is_classic": false,
    "is_flags_enabled": false,
    "last_modified": "2024-01-17T06:31:20.085922Z",
    "name": "Edge project",
    "platform": "web",
    "sdks": [],
    "status": "active",
    "web_snippet": {
      "code_revision": 2,
      "enable_force_variation": false,
      "exclude_disabled_experiments": false,
      "exclude_names": true,
      "include_jquery": false,
      "ip_anonymization": false,
      "js_file_size": 85004,
      "library": "none"
    }
  }
]

Start building

After performing the previous steps, you can start building an application with Optimizely Web Experimentation. See Optimizely API for information about all of our supported endpoints.

You can download our Postman collection to experiment with the APIs using Postman.

Questions about using the REST API? Submit a ticket to the Optimizely Support team.