REST API

indice serve exposes a small HTTP API alongside the human-facing pages. The base URL is wherever you serve (default http://127.0.0.1:8080); behind a reverse proxy everything sits under whatever path you mount it at.

Note

indice is alpha software — these shapes may still change. The read-only endpoints below are the stable, public surface; the management write API (see the end) is an internal detail of the workroom UI.

GET /api/search

Full-text search as JSON — the same engine behind the search page.

Query parameters

Param	Required	Description
q	yes	The query. Supports the full search syntax — including field filters like site:example.com, year:2021, type:pdf, lang:en, and collection:<slug>, so facets are expressed inside q.
limit	no	Max results to return. Default 20, capped at 200.

curl 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/search?q=climate+site:example.com&limit=5'

Response (illustrative, abbreviated):

{
  "total": 264,
  "capped": false,
  "results": [
    {
      "doc_type": "html",
      "url": "https://example.com/report",
      "domain": "example.com",
      "timestamp": "20250802185600",
      "title": "Climate report — annual summary",
      "crawl_id": "4eefdff3",
      "crawl_name": "example crawl",
      "collection": "example-collection",
      "snippet": "…an annual <mark>climate</mark> report…",
      "capture_count": 3,
      "status": 200
    }
  ],
  "facets": [
    { "field": "collection", "label": "Collection",
      "buckets": [ { "value": "example-collection", "count": 220 } ] },
    { "field": "year", "label": "Year",
      "buckets": [ { "value": "2025", "count": 129 } ] }
  ]
}

Fields

• total — number of matching documents; capped is true when that count is approximate (very large result sets).
• results[] — up to limit hits, each with: doc_type (media bucket, e.g. html, pdf), url, domain, timestamp (the capture time), title, crawl_id (8-char id) and crawl_name, collection (slug), snippet (a hit-highlighted excerpt, with <mark> around matches), capture_count (how many times this URL was captured, grouped into one result), and status (the archived HTTP status).
• facets[] — facet groups, each { field, label, buckets: [{ value, count }] }, matching the sidebar on the search page.

GET /health

A liveness check: returns 200 OK with the body ok. Useful for container/orchestrator health probes.

Machine-readable replay endpoints

These serve ReplayWeb.page and are handy for tooling, though their primary consumer is the in-browser player:

• GET /files/{id} — the raw WACZ for a crawl, honoring HTTP Range requests (partial fetches). This is how replay reads archived resources without downloading the whole file.
• GET /collection/{id}/replay.json — a multi-WACZ replay manifest for a collection (every member crawl), handed to wabac.js so cross-crawl links resolve.
• GET /collection/{id}/pages — the collection’s page list and URL→capture resolution, scoped to the collection.

See How indice works for how these fit together.

Management write API

When you run serve --manage, indice additionally mounts write endpoints under /api/ (add archives, create/edit collections, delete crawls, and Browsertrix/Archive-It import), plus SSE progress streams. These power the workroom UI and are gated by the same auth as the rest of management (loopback trust, or a forward-auth proxy). They are an implementation detail of that UI rather than a stable public API, and are never mounted by the default read-only serve.