Mailman 3 Core REST API

Here is extensive documentation on the Mailman Core administrative REST API.

The REST server

Mailman exposes a REST HTTP server for administrative control.

The server listens for connections on a configurable host name and port.

It is always protected by HTTP basic authentication using a single global user name and password. The credentials are set in the [webservice] section of the configuration using the admin_user and admin_pass properties.

Because the REST server has full administrative access, it should never be exposed to the public internet. By default it only listens to connections on localhost. Don’t change this unless you really know what you’re doing. In addition you should set the user name and password to secure values and distribute them to any REST clients with reasonable precautions.

The Mailman major and minor version numbers are in the URL.

You can write your own HTTP clients to speak this API, or you can use the official Python bindings.

Root URL

In this documentation, we mainly use http://localhost:9001/3.0/ as the REST root url. Port 9001 is used for unit tests, but for a running system, the port is 8001 unless changed in config.

In the documentation we use 3.0 as the primary API version, but the latest version of the API might be different. You may check the difference of versions in Basic Operation.

The hostname and port where Mailman’s REST API will be listening can be found by running mailman info command. You can configure that in mailman.cfg configuration file.:

>>> from mailman.testing.documentation import cli
>>> command = cli('mailman.commands.cli_info.info')

>>> command('mailman info')
GNU Mailman 3...
Python ...
...
config file: .../test.cfg
db url: ...
REST root url: http://localhost:9001/3.1/
REST credentials: restadmin:restpass

Helpers

There are several Documentation Helpers which are used throughout the Mailman documentation. These include the utilities like dump_json(), dump_msgdata() and call_http().

These helpers methods are simply meant to simplify the documentation and are hence included in the namespaces without imports. If you are trying out these commands on your local machine, you can replace them with curl commands instead.

Note

While the documentation below refers only to dump_json calls, other utilities mentioned above will also have similar curl equivalents, albeit without the | python -m json.tool part, which is only meant only to pretty print the json response.

For example, call like:

>>> from mailman.testing.documentation import dump_json
>>> dump_json('http://localhost:9001/3.1/domains')
entry 0:
    alias_domain: None
    base_url: None
    description: An example domain.
    http_etag: "..."
    mail_host: example.com
    self_link: http://localhost:9001/3.1/domains/example.com
http_etag: "..."
start: 0
total_size: 1

is a GET request to the URL specified as the first parameter. An equivalent curl command for this would be:

$ curl --user restadmin:restpass http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains | python -m json.tool
{
"entries": [
     {
         "alias_domain": null,
         "base_url": null,
         "description": null,
         "http_etag": "\"75a9858de80b96f525d71157558fff523cb940c3\"",
         "mail_host": "example.com",
         "self_link": "http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains/example.com"
     }
 ],
 "http_etag": "\"33480b0f1e9249f6bbcc2c55a1ffaa33c13d424f\"",
 "start": 0,
 "total_size": 1
 }

Warning

Note that the port used in the above two commands are intentionally different. Documentation uses 9001 to make sure that the doctests do not run against a running instance of Mailman. By Default the REST API is available at 8001 port on the host where Mailman Core is listening.

Note

For authentication, the username & password specified with --user is only the default values. Please change them to the appropriate values.

Similarly, when some data is provided, the requests are actually post requests:

>>> dump_json('http://localhost:9001/3.1/domains', {
...           'mail_host': 'lists.example.com',
...           })
content-length: 0
content-type: application/json
date: ...
location: http://localhost:9001/3.1/domains/lists.example.com
 ...

This is equivalent to:

$ curl --user restadmin:restpass -X POST http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains \
    -d mail_host=lists.example.com
$ curl --user restadmin:restpass http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains | python -m json.tool
{
 "entries": [
     {
         "alias_domain": null,
         "base_url": null,
         "description": null,
         "http_etag": "\"75a9858de80b96f525d71157558fff523cb940c3\"",
         "mail_host": "example.com",
         "self_link": "http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains/example.com"
     },
     {
         "alias_domain": null,
         "base_url": null,
         "description": null,
         "http_etag": "\"a13efb90674956b3ed26363705bf966a954f1121\"",
         "mail_host": "lists.example.com",
         "self_link": "http://localhost:8001/3.1/domains/lists.example.com"
     }
 ],
 "http_etag": "\"8c1a1d2664b41673bc61126b99359772ce93cfdb\"",
 "start": 0,
 "total_size": 2
 }

Note

Note that by default, Mailman’s REST API accepts both application/json and application/x-www-form-urlencoded inputs with PATCH and POST requests. We are using the latter in the call above, but you can also use JSON inputs if you prefer that.

Pay careful attention to which request type you are using. As a rule of thumb, when you are creating new resources, like a Domain resource in the above call you have to use POST. However, when updating an existing resource, you’d want to use PATCH request. Mailman also support PUT requests for updating a resource, but you need to specify all the attributes when updating via a PUT request.

Mailman 3 Core REST API

The REST server

Root URL

Helpers

REST API Documentation