Wowza Streaming Engine™ 4.3 or later media server software includes a RESTful Application Programming Interface (API) that you can use to configure, manage, and monitor a media server through HTTP requests. Two common query languages to use to execute HTTP requests are cURL and PHP.
Query the REST API using cURL
The Wowza Streaming Engine REST API examples in this documentation site use curl commands. cURL is a command-line tool that allows you to execute HTTP requests. It is native to the Terminal application on macOS and Linux, but it requires some installation for use in the Command Prompt on Windows operating systems. To find a download for Windows, see the curl Download Wizard.
The format for cURL requests to the Wowza Streaming REST API is:
curl -X [METHOD] [Headers] http://[your-wowza-server]:8087/v2/[path-to-resource]
In our query examples, we use line breaks for ease of viewing.
curl -X [METHOD] \ [Headers] \ http://[your-wowza-server]:8087/v2/[path-to-resource]
Headers are information that precede the actual HTTP request. The Wowza Streaming Engine REST API requests in our examples use the Accept, Content-Type, and charset headers as follows:
-H 'Accept:application/json; charset=utf-8' -H 'Content-Type:application/json; charset=utf-8'
The Accept and Content-Type headers instruct the requests and responses to use JSON syntax. The charset header specifies that the requests and responses use UTF-8 character encoding. The headers can also be specified discretely, as in:
-H 'Accept: application/json' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'charset: utc-8'
If you prefer to use XML syntax, change the headers to:
-H 'Accept:application/xml; charset=utf-8' -H 'Content-Type:application/xml; charset=utf-8'
The HTTP method is the action you're requesting of the resource. The Wowza Streaming Engine REST API uses four cURL methods, or commands:
- GET - Obtain information from the resource.
- PUT - Update information or perform an action on an existing record.
- POST - Create a record.
- DELETE - Remove an existing record.
Parameters and properties can be used to refine the request. They generally correspond to options in the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager.
The resource is the HTTP location where you're sending the request. In the Wowza Streaming Engine REST API, the base resource is
http://[your-wowza-server]:8087/v2/[path-to-resource]
Note: In our query examples, authentication is disabled in the Server.xml file:
<AuthenticationMethod>none</AuthenticationMethod>If you set the authentication method to digest, for example, you'll want to add that to the cURL request as follows:
curl -X [METHOD] \ --digest -u "user:pass" \ [Headers] \ http://[your-wowza-server]:8087/v2/[path-to-resource]For more information on authenticating API requests, see Change the authentication method for the Wowza Streaming Engine REST API.
Query the REST API using PHP
You can wrap the Wowza Streaming Engine REST API with a custom PHP library to configure, manage, and monitor your server through PHP requests. First, download the PHP library from GitHub. Then, point the library to your streaming media server by modifying the following lines in include/constants.php as follows:
define("BASE_DIR", dirname(dirname(__FILE__)));
define("WOWZA_HOST","http://localhost:8087/v2");
define("WOWZA_SERVER_INSTANCE", "serverName");
define("WOWZA_VHOST_INSTANCE", "vhostName");
define("WOWZA_USERNAME", "admin");
define("WOWZA_PASSWORD", "admin");PHP query examples are available in the tests folder of the Wowza Streaming Engine PHP library download.
