Xero-Insomnia

An Insomnia collection for authenticating to and calling many of the Xero API endpoints.

Steps to get up and running

Follow these steps to quickly get up and running with the Xero API and Insomnia.

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1. Download Insomnia Client

Visit Insomnia and download the desktop client.

http://insomnia.rest/

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2. Create an API app

https://developer.xero.com/myapps

In the Xero developer portal create an API app.

Set 'OAuth 2.0 redirect uri' to: "https://localhost/"

If you haven't signed up for a xero developer account you can do that here.

3. Pick a collection to import

A) Import (XeroAPI Basic collection)

This collections has a single authentication route and one sample API call

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B) Import (XeroAPI Full Collection)

This collection has the majority of the XeroAPI endpoints already built out

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4. Add client_id, client_secret and scopes to the environment variables in Insomnia

Get the id & secret from your /myapps API app.

Understand & pick your XeroAPI scopes.

https://developer.xero.com/documentation/oauth2/scopes

At a minimun you probably want to add "openid profile email offline_access accounting.transactions" - and if you chose the Full Collection you will have to add (basically) all the scope to interact with all the imported endpoints.

Finally, copy those 3 items into this file in your desktop client.

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5. Authorize Xero and and get your access_token

Click 'Fetch Tokens' which will prompt a Xero login screen.

Once you return it should populate the access & refresh token.

You can now add an actual request to the Authorize OAuth2 panel to hit the /connections route via POST which will use the access_token to return your active connections.

Once the /connection route is setup, click Send, this will return your active API connections. Chose a tenantId to populate in your environment file's empty tenant_id value.

Then paste both the tenant_id & the access_token into the environment file.

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6. Paste the access_token back into your environment variables

Once you have an access_token plugged in, you will be able to make API calls.

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7. Refresh token for continued access

You can continually visit the Authentication route to refresh a token by clicking Refresh Token.

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IMPORTANT

You will need to copy/paste your refreshed access_token into the env variables section each time you refresh your token_set.

~13 min video tutorial on setting up Insomnia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_k8Z8Zq99s

Blogpost on setting up Insomnia

https://devblog.xero.com/insomnia-client-xeroapi-auth-1c4cf485f251