Getting started with the LUSID REST API and SDKs

LUSID is an ecosystem of applications.

At its core, the LUSID REST API provides access to strategic investment data management capabilities for your LUSID domain.

Note: If you haven't yet signed up for a LUSID trial and created your own domain, follow these instructions.

You can exercise the LUSID REST API directly in the same way as for any RESTful API, or indirectly using:

• The suite of open-source SDKs in multiple languages/frameworks: Python, C#, Java, JavaScript, Angular.
• The LUSID web app, a GUI front end that can act as a testbed or standalone application.
• The Excel plug-in, which provides a set of Excel functions to interact with the LUSID API.

With a suitable additional license, you can also read investment data from and write to LUSID using Luminesce, a SQL-based data virtualisation tool.

Authentication

Every call to the LUSID REST API, whether direct or indirect, must be authorised by an API access token.

For much more on identity management and access control (IAM) in LUSID, start with this table of contents. There's a step-by-step tutorial explaining the different mechanisms for obtaining API tokens for calls to the REST API and via the SDKs.

Using the LUSID REST API

You can call the LUSID REST API for your LUSID domain using standard tools such as cURL or Postman. The following example calls the LUSID ListInstruments API to retrieve the current contents of the instrument master for an acmecorp domain:

You can also interact with the LUSID REST API for your domain using Swagger's 'Try it out' functionality, by navigating to https://<your-domain>.lusid.com/api/swagger. For example, for an acmecorp domain:

Using the LUSID SDKs

LUSID SDKs are freely available to download from and contribute to via GitHub. For convenient access, click on the SDK links on this page. See the GitHub README page for each repo for installation and usage instructions.

Note:

• Version 1 of the LUSID SDKs have a standard and a preview repo. The standard repo provides access to stable APIs. The preview repo provides early access to a wider selection of non-production APIs. From version 2 onwards, all APIs are available from one SDK and you do not need to use the Preview SDK to access these. For information on upgrading to the latest version, see this article.
• For Python there is also LUSID Python Tools (LPT), a wrapper around the LUSID Python SDK that provides a suite of bulk data loading and other convenience utilities.