Quickstart for Kimai API (JSON / REST)

Read the Swagger documentation of the Kimai API in your Kimai installation at /api/doc. For example, you can have a look at the API docs for the demo installation at https://demo.kimai.org/api/doc. You need to authenticate to see them, credentials can be found here.

Or you can export the JSON collection by visiting /api/doc.json. Save the result in a file, which can be imported with Postman.

Authentication

When calling the API you have to submit an additional Authorization header with every call:

• Authorization: Bearer xyz - here xyz is the unique API token for that account

API tokens

Each user can generate multiple API tokens.

Each token has the following fields:

• name, which is only for yourself for simpler identification.
• expiration date which is optional - if set, this token won’t work from the configured date on
• last usage will be updated once a minute, when used - helps to identify obsolete tokens

Swagger file

The API calls can be exported in a Swagger file format, which can be imported into your tool of choice. You find the link in the API docs (the URL is api/doc.json).

To use the API with Postman, the simplest approach is to export the swagger file and import it with Postman.

Data types

Default values

The API does not promise any BC on any default value. This is especially true for optional booleans (see below).

DateTime formats (ISO 8601 and HTML5)

TL;DR

• the API returns ISO 8601
• the API expects HTML5 “local date and time” format

The API returns ISO 8601 formatted datetime strings in the users local time, including the timezone offset.

When POSTing or PATCHing timesheet records, you MUST use the HTML5 format (see RFC 3339 as well). Even if the API might allow different formats, only this one is guaranteed to work in the future. It is also the only format that works correct, adding a timezone might and will result in unexpected and wrong records.

Please read this article to find out more about the “local date and time” pattern.

• PHP pattern: yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss or Y-m-d\TH:i:s (for example 2019-04-20T14:00:00).
• moment.js pattern: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss or moment.HTML5_FMT.DATETIME_LOCAL_SECONDS.

Be aware: Kimai treats the given datetime as local time and adds the configured users timezone without changing the given time.

Read this comment to understand the backgrounds about that decision.

Boolean

All boolean fields in POST and PATCH requests are optional, defaulting to false if unset.

Therefor you should declare all booleans, no matter if you want them to be true or false.

The field will be mapped to false if it is either not provided or false. Providing any other value, including null, will turn the value to true.