Service index

The service index is a JSON document that is the entry point for a NuGet package source and allows a client implementation to discover the package source's capabilities. The service index is a JSON object with two required properties: version (the schema version of the service index) and resources (the endpoints or capabilities of the package source).

nuget.org's service index is located at https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json.

Versioning

The version value is a SemVer 2.0.0 parseable version string which indicates the schema version of the service index. The API mandates that the version string has a major version number of 3. As non-breaking changes are made to the service index schema, the version string's minor version will be increased.

Each resource in the service index is versioned independently from the service index schema version.

The current schema version is 3.0.0. The 3.0.0 version is functionally equivalent to the older 3.0.0-beta.1 version but should be preferred as it more clearly communicates the stable, defined schema.

HTTP methods

The service index is accessible using HTTP methods GET and HEAD.

Resources

The resources property contains an array of resources supported by this package source.

Resource

A resource is an object in the resources array. It represents a versioned capability of a package source. A resource has the following properties:

Name Type Required Notes
@id string yes The URL to the resource
@type string yes A string constant representing the resource type
comment string no A human readable description of the resource

The @id is a URL that must be absolute and must either have the HTTP or HTTPS schema.

The @type is used to identify the specific protocol to use when interacting with resource. The type of the resource is an opaque string but generally has the format:

{RESOURCE_NAME}/{RESOURCE_VERSION}

Clients are expected to hard code the @type values that they understand and look them up in a package source's service index. The exact @type values in use today are enumerated on the individual resource reference documents listed in the API overview.

For the sake of this documentation, the documentation about different resources will essentially be grouped by the {RESOURCE_NAME} found in the service index which is analogous to grouping by scenario.

There is no requirement that each resource has a unique @id or @type. It is up to the client implementation to determine which resource to prefer over another. One possible implementation is that resources of the same or compatible @type can be used in a round-robin fashion in case of connection failure or server error.

Sample request

GET https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json

Sample response

{
  "version": "3.0.0",
  "resources": [
    {
      "@id": "https://api.nuget.org/v3-flatcontainer/",
      "@type": "PackageBaseAddress/3.0.0",
      "comment": "Base URL of Azure storage where NuGet package registration info for NET Core is stored, in the format https://api.nuget.org/v3-flatcontainer/{id-lower}/{id-lower}.{version-lower}.nupkg"
    },
    {
      "@id": "https://www.nuget.org/api/v2/package",
      "@type": "PackagePublish/2.0.0"
    },
    {
      "@id": "https://api-v2v3search-0.nuget.org/query",
      "@type": "SearchQueryService/3.0.0-rc",
      "comment": "Query endpoint of NuGet Search service (primary) used by RC clients"
    },
    {
      "@id": "https://api-v2v3search-0.nuget.org/autocomplete",
      "@type": "SearchAutocompleteService/3.0.0-rc",
      "comment": "Autocomplete endpoint of NuGet Search service (primary) used by RC clients"
    },
    {
      "@id": "https://api.nuget.org/v3/registration2/",
      "@type": "RegistrationsBaseUrl/3.0.0-rc",
      "comment": "Base URL of Azure storage where NuGet package registration info is stored used by RC clients. This base URL does not include SemVer 2.0.0 packages."
    }
  ]
}