cPanel API cURL - Creating a session

Martin Ward

• July 29, 2026 14:49

Hi all,

I am in need of guidance. I am an old hat with linux, computers, the web and development but I am struggling to actually start working with accessing cPanel via API. Partly it is confusion with APIs and UAPI. I'm going to ask questions, please answer those that you can.

1. The docs all push towards using UAPI but I cannot work out what UAPI is. Can you explain this please?
2. I cannot find a simple 'Hello World' example for accessing the cPanel API, does such a thing exist?
3. I have generated an API token, which is required, but do i need to create a session token using it or can I just make API calls straight off?
4. Can I use the API token I generated with UAPI as well as API v2?
5. I am currently starting simple and using cURL but will want to move across to Python, is there an example of using Python, a cPanel-specific library or do I just use the 'requests' module? 

 

Thanks for your time and patience.

 

|\/|artin

• 

  Martin Ward

  • July 29, 2026 15:58

  As a follow-up, I have been trying different cURL commands and they pretty much al return with:

  <p>Token authentication allows access to UAPI or API 2 calls only.</p>

  My latest failure was:

  $ curl -u 'user:password' -H"Authorization: cpanel user:TOKEN" "https://example.com:2083/ServerInformation/get_information?api.version=2.0"

  I've tried it with and without "?api.version=2.0" at the end of the URL.

  I've tried it with and without the "-u user:password".

  The result is the same as detailed above.

  0
• 

  cPRex Jurassic Moderator

  • July 29, 2026 16:03

  Hey there!  I'll answer these in order to make sure nothing gets missed:

  1- I like to think of the cPanel API as two levels - just like there is a WHM for root tasks and a cPanel for user tasks, there is a whmap1 and uapi system for those types of calls.

  2 - No, that isn't really how it works.  You call a specific API to perform the function you want.

  3 - My best answer to this is "maybe" but in your case probably not.  You only need the session if you want to access a specific service as the user.  https://api.docs.cpanel.net/specifications/whm.openapi/session#/specifications/whm.openapi/session/session-create_user_session.  For most calls involving a URL, it will create a new session for your specific work automatically.

  4 - No - this is covered in the blue notification box here - https://docs.cpanel.net/knowledge-base/security/how-to-use-cpanel-api-tokens/

  5 - Correct, you would just use the "requests" module to get this working inside other code.

  0

Please sign in to leave a comment.