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API tokens

Authentication strategies in Strapi can either be based on the use of the Users & Permissions plugin or on the built-in API token feature.

Using API tokens allows executing a request on REST API or GraphQL API endpoints as an authenticated user.

API tokens can be helpful to give access to people or applications without managing a user account or changing anything in the Users & Permissions plugin.

Creation​

New API tokens are generated from the admin panel.

Usage​

When performing a request to Strapi's REST API, the API token should be added to the request's Authorization header with the following syntax: bearer your-api-token.

note

Read-only API tokens can only access the find and findOne functions.

Configuration​

New API tokens are generated using a salt. This salt is automatically generated by Strapi and stored in .env as API_TOKEN_SALT.

The salt can be customized:

caution

Changing the salt invalidates all the existing API tokens.