Getting started

What Doclift does

Doclift generates PDF documents from templates you design once and reuse from your server. You send a template id and a set of variables, Doclift renders the document and hands it back through a webhook once it is ready. The layout itself lives outside your codebase, so changing it never requires a deploy.

Create your account

Sign up. A sandbox environment is available immediately. See Environments for what differs between sandbox and production.

Create an API key

Every request authenticates with an API key, called an external application in the dashboard. Create one and choose its environment (sandbox or production).

Copy the key the moment it is generated. Afterward, Doclift only ever shows it back to you masked (revealable_secret_key, all but its last 8 characters replaced with •). There is no way to retrieve the raw value again from the dashboard or the API.

Send your first request

GET /api/v1/user needs no other setup and confirms your key works:

curl https://app.doclift.io/api/v1/user \
  -H "X-Api-Key: <your-api-key>"

{
  "id": 100001,
  "firstname": "John",
  "lastname": "Doe",
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "current_external_application": {
    "name": "My App",
    "environment": "sandbox",
    "active": true
  }
}

The full field reference, including your organization's limits, is on API basics.

What a failure looks like

Every request answers 403 Forbidden if the key is missing, unknown, or belongs to a disabled external application. It is always one of these two bodies, never a generic message:

{ "error": "Please add an 'X-Api-Key' HTTP header." }

{ "error": "Invalid or disabled API Key" }

A disabled key and an unknown key answer identically. You cannot tell them apart from the response. The full status code and error-envelope reference is on API basics.

Pick the right template family before you build

Doclift has three template families (custom, fillable_form, and workflow) and they do not expose the same API surface. Sending a fillable_form or workflow id to a template-editing endpoint fails with a 404, identical to an id that does not exist at all. Read Template types before you create your first template; it is a five-minute read that saves a wasted afternoon.

Next