Updating or deleting a resource

In this guide, we will walk through how to update and delete a resource using the Passbolt API.

For this example, the ID of the resource being manipulated is fc11887b-aaa6-4600-a460-e05e99c75bce.

Updating a resource

For this article, let's say that our secret, once decrypted, contains the following data, as created earlier:

{
    "password": "Correct Horse Battery Staple",
    "description": "My personal cloud storage"
}

We, as an API client, would like to update the resource's username field to "[email protected]", as well as update the encrypted description to "My remote collaboration platform".

We now need to build the payload that we are going to send to the API.

Updating the secret

By design, the secret can never be decrypted by the Passbolt API, so no incremental or differential update is possible: we need to update it all at once.

With the updated description, the decrypted secret looks like this:

{
    "password": "Correct Horse Battery Staple",
    "description": "My remote collaboration platform"
}

Once encrypted and signed using our own key, we get an armored string starting with -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----.

As this is a personal resource, we only need to re-encrypt our version of the secret. If it was a shared one, we would need to re-encrypt the updated secret for everyone having access to this resource, using their corresponding public key.

We need to tell the API which user is this secret for, so the base payload now looks like this:

{
  "secrets": [
    {
      "user_id": "8bb80df5-700c-48ce-b568-85a60fc3c8f2",
      "data": "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----"
    }
  ]
}

Updating the metadata

As the metadata isn't End-to-end encrypted (yet 😉) an incremental update can be performed.

We only want to update the resource's username field, so the final payload looks like this:

{
  "username": "[email protected]",
  "secrets": [
    {
      "user_id": "8bb80df5-700c-48ce-b568-85a60fc3c8f2",
      "data": "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----"
    }
  ]
}

Making the request

This payload is then sent as the body of a PUT request to /resources/fc11887b-aaa6-4600-a460-e05e99c75bce.json, with fc11887b-aaa6-4600-a460-e05e99c75bce being the resource ID, obtained in the initial index call.

If all went well, the request is successful, congratulations! 🎉

Deleting a resource

Deleting the resource is as simple as querying it!

In order to do just that, a DELETE call needs to be made to the same URL as the update one, /resource/fc11887b-aaa6-4600-a460-e05e99c75bce.json for this resource.

The API replies with:

{
    "header": {
        "id": "3bf00865-c849-4986-ac2a-0ced43e78731",
        "status": "success",
        "servertime": 1726147401,
        "action": "bf1a9a51-eb99-51b3-b15a-fe21a235585c",
        "message": "The resource has been deleted successfully.",
        "url": "/resources/fc11887b-aaa6-4600-a460-e05e99c75bce.json",
        "code": 200
    },
    "body": null
}

Congratulations, you just deleted a resource! 🎉