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Developer Reference

Learn about DigitalOcean's APIs, CLI, Terraform provider, and open source contributions.

DigitalOcean provides several command-line interfaces (CLIs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) for managing your resources. This section provides the reference materials for these offerings, as well as resources from the open source community.

Programmatically manage your Droplets, Spaces, and other DigitalOcean resources using conventional HTTP requests. You can use our RESTful APIs for any action that you can perform through the control panel.
Manage your DigitalOcean resources from the command line with doctl, our open-source command line interface (CLI).
Deploy and change many resources simultaneously using the open source Terraform tool.
Official and community-created client libraries that let you use the DigitalOcean API in a variety of programming languages.
We use and contribute to open source software.

Latest Updates

25 September 2023

  • Password-based authentication for newly created Rocky 8 Droplets will be disabled 30 days from today, on October 25, 2023, due to an incompatibility between Rocky 8’s password authentication mechanism and DigitalOcean’s provisioning system. SSH-based login will remain available.

    Previously created Rocky 8 Droplets will not be affected.

  • Password-based authentication for newly created Alma 9 Droplets will be disabled 30 days from today, on October 25, 2023, due to an incompatibility between Alma 9’s password authentication mechanism and DigitalOcean’s provisioning system. SSH-based login will remain available.

    Previously created Alma 9 Droplets will not be affected.

24 August 2023

  • The 429 error response to reaching our API’s burst rate limit now includes a Retry-After header to indicate how long to wait (in seconds) before retrying a request. This additional header enables the configuration of automatic retries and exponentional backoffs in DigitalOcean clients such as doctl, Terraform, and Godo. Learn more about our API burst limit structure in our API Documentation.

18 August 2023

  • Released v1.98.0 of doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI. This release adds support for automatically retrying API requests that fail with a 429 or 500-level error. The number of attempts can be configured using the --http-retry-max flag or DIGITALOCEAN_HTTP_RETRY_MAX environment variable. To disable retries altogether, set to 0.

For more information, see the full release notes.