CKAN’s Action API is a powerful, RPC-style API that exposes all of CKAN’s core features to API clients. All of a CKAN website’s core functionality (everything you can do with the web interface and more) can be used by external code that calls the CKAN API. For example, using the CKAN API your app can:

• Get JSON-formatted lists of a site’s datasets, groups or other CKAN objects:

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/package_list

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/group_list

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/tag_list

• Get a full JSON representation of a dataset, resource or other object:

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/package_show?id=adur_district_spending

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/tag_show?id=gold

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/group_show?id=data-explorer

• Search for packages or resources matching a query:

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/package_search?q=spending

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/resource_search?query=name:District%20Names

• Create, update and delete datasets, resources and other objects

• Get an activity stream of recently changed datasets on a site:

  http://demo.ckan.org/api/3/action/recently_changed_packages_activity_list

CKAN’s FileStore and DataStore extensions have their own APIs, see:

• FileStore and file uploads
• DataStore extension