Authorisation

API key authentication

The Companies House API requires authentication credentials, in the form of an API key, to be sent with each request.

To obtain an API key, go to Your applications and register the application with the Companies House Developer Hub as an API Key application. This will allocate a unique key to the application which can be sent with any GET request for a public resource served by the Companies House API.

Sending the API key

The Companies House API uses HTTP Basic Authentication to transmit an API key between the client application and the server. Basic authentication is usually made up of a username and password pair; the Companies House API takes the username as the API key and ignores the password, so can be left blank.

Example

HTTP Basic Authentication

For an API key of my_api_key, the following curl request demonstrates the setting of the Authorization HTTP request header, as defined by RFC2617.

curl -XGET -u my_api_key: https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00000006

GET /company/00000006 HTTP/1.1
Host: api.companieshouse.gov.uk
Authorization: Basic bXlfYXBpX2tleTo=