Introduction

This document describes the HTTPS API to query information from the VNDB database and manage user lists.

This version of the API is intended to replace the old TCP-based API, although the old API will likely remain available for the forseeable future.

Status: Stable, but still missing some functionality.

API endpoint: https://api.vndb.org/kana

A sandbox endpoint is available for testing and development at https://beta.vndb.org/api/kana, for more information see the sandbox.

Usage Terms

This service is free for non-commercial use. The API is provided on a best-effort basis, no guarantees are made about the stability or applicability of this service.

The data obtained through this API is subject to our Data License.

API access is rate-limited in order to keep server resources in check. The server will allow up to 200 requests per 5 minutes and up to 1 second of execution time per minute. Requests taking longer than 3 seconds will be aborted. These limits should be more than enough for most applications, but if this is still too limiting for you, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

This API intentionally does not expose all functionality provided by VNDB. Some site features, such as forums, database editing or account creation will not be exposed through the API, other features may be missing simply because nobody has asked for it yet. If you need anything not yet provided by the API or if you have any other questions, feel free to post on the forums, the issue tracker or mail contact@vndb.org.

Common Data Types

vndbid

A ‘vndbid’ is an identifier for an entry in the database, typically formatted as a number with a one or two character prefix, e.g. “v17” refers to this visual novel and “sf190” refers to this screenshot.

The API will return vndbids as a JSON string, but the filters also accept bare integers if the prefix is unambiguous from the context.

release date

Release dates are represented as JSON strings as either "YYYY-MM-DD", "YYYY-MM" or "YYYY" formats, depending on whether the day and month are known. Unspecified future dates are returned as "TBA". The values "unknown" and "today" are also supported in filters.

Partial dates are ordered after complete dates for the same year/month, i.e. "2022" is ordered after "2022-12", which in turn is ordered after "2022-12-31". This can be unintuitive when writing filters: ["released", "<", "2022-01"] also matches all complete dates in Jan 2022. Likewise, ["released", "=", "2022"] only matches items for which the release date is exactly "2022", not any other date in that year.

enumeration types

Several fields in the database are represented as an integer or string with a limited number of possible values. These values are either documented for the particular field or listed separately in the schema JSON.

User Authentication

The majority of the API endpoints below are usable without any form of authentication, but some user-related actions - in particular, list management - require the calls to be authenticated with the respective VNDB user account.

The API understands cookies originating from the main vndb.org domain, so user scripts running from the site only have to ensure that XMLHttpRequest.withCredentials or the Fetch API “credentials” parameter is set.

In all other cases, token authentication should to be used. Users can obtain a token by opening their “My Profile” form and going to the “Applications” tab. The URL https://vndb.org/u/tokens can also be used to redirect users to this form. Tokens look like xxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxx, with each x representing a lowercase z-base-32 character. The dashes in between are optional.

Tokens may be included in API requests using the Authorization header with the Token type, for example:

Authorization: Token hsoo-ybws4-j8yb9-qxkw-5obay-px8to-bfyk

A HTTP 401 error is returned if the token is invalid. The GET /authinfo endpoint can be used validate and extract information from tokens.

Simple Requests

GET /schema

Returns a JSON object with metadata about several API objects, including enumeration values, which fields are available for querying and a list of supported external links. The JSON structure is hopefully self-explanatory.

This information does not change very often and can safely be used for code generation or dynamic API introspection.

GET /stats

Returns a few overall database statistics.

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/stats

{
  "chars": 112347,
  "producers": 14789,
  "releases": 91490,
  "staff": 27929,
  "tags": 2783,
  "traits": 3115,
  "vn": 36880
}

GET /user

Lookup users by id or username. Accepts two query parameters:

q

User ID or username to look up, can be given multiple times to look up multiple users.

fields

List of fields to select. The ‘id’ and ‘username’ fields are always selected and should not be specified here.

The response object contains one key for each given q parameter, its value is either null if no such user was found or otherwise an object with the following fields:

id

String in "u123" format.

username

String.

lengthvotes

Integer, number of play time votes this user has submitted.

lengthvotes_sum

Integer, sum of the user’s play time votes, in minutes.

Strings that look like user IDs are not valid usernames, so the lookup is unambiguous. Usernames matching is case-insensitive.

curl 'https://api.vndb.org/kana/user?q=NoUserWithThisNameExists&q=AYO&q=u3'

{
  "AYO": {
    "id": "u3",
    "username": "ayo"
  },
  "NoUserWithThisNameExists": null,
  "u3": {
    "id": "u3",
    "username": "ayo"
  }
}

curl 'https://api.vndb.org/kana/user?q=yorhel&fields=lengthvotes,lengthvotes_sum'

{
  "yorhel": {
    "id": "u2",
    "lengthvotes": 9,
    "lengthvotes_sum": 9685,
    "username": "Yorhel"
  }
}

GET /authinfo

Validates and returns information about the given API token. The JSON object has the following members:

id

String, user ID.

username

String, username.

permissions

Array of strings, permissions granted to this token.

The following permissions are currently implemented:

listread

Allows read access to private labels and entries in the user’s visual novel list.

listwrite

Allows write access to the user’s visual novel list.

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/authinfo\
    --header 'Authorization: token cdhy-bqy1q-6zobu-8w9k-xobxh-wzz4o-84fn'

{
  "id": "u3",
  "username": "ayo",
  "permissions": [
    "listread"
  ]
}

Database Querying

API Structure

Searching for and fetching database entries is done through a custom query format¹. Queries are sent as POST requests, but I expect to also support the QUERY HTTP method once that gains more software support.

Query format

A query is a JSON object that looks like this:

{
  "filters": [],
  "fields": "",
  "sort": "id",
  "reverse": false,
  "results": 10,
  "page": 1,
  "user": null,
  "count": false,
  "compact_filters": false,
  "normalized_filters": false
}

All members are optional, defaults are shown above.

filters

Filters are used to determine which database items to fetch, see the section on Filters below.

fields

String. Comma-separated list of fields to fetch for each database item. Dot notation can be used to select nested JSON objects, e.g. "image.url" will select the url field inside the image object. Multiple nested fields can be selected with brackets, e.g. "image{id,url,dims}" is equivalent to "image.id, image.url, image.dims".

Every field of interest must be explicitely mentioned, there is no support for wildcard matching. The same applies to nested objects, it is an error to list image without sub-fields in the example above.

The top-level id field is always selected by default and does not have to be mentioned in this list.

sort

Field to sort on. Supported values depend on the type of data being queried and are documented separately.

reverse

Set to true to sort in descending order.

results

Number of results per page, max 100. Can also be set to 0 if you’re not interested in the results at all, but just want to verify your query or get the count, compact_filters or normalized_filters.

page

Page number to request, starting from 1. See also the note on pagination below.

user

User ID. This field is mainly used for POST /ulist, but it also sets the default user ID to use for the visual novel “label” filter. Defaults to the currently authenticated user.

count

Whether the response should include the count field (see below). This option should be avoided when the count is not needed since it has a considerable performance impact.

compact_filters

Whether the response should include the compact_filters field (see below).

normalized_filters

Whether the response should include the normalized_filters field (see below).

Response format

{
  "results": [],
  "more": false,
  "count": 1,
  "compact_filters": "",
  "normalized_filters": [],
}

results

Array of objects representing the query results.

more

When true, repeating the query with an incremented page number will yield more results. This is a cheaper form of pagination than using the count field.

count

Only present if the query contained "count":true. Indicates the total number of entries that matched the given filters.

compact_filters

Only present if the query contained "compact_filters":true. This is a compact string representation of the filters given in the query.

normalized_filters

Only present if the query contained "normalized_filters":true. This is a normalized JSON representation of the filters given in the query.

Filters

Simple predicates are represented as a three-element JSON array containing a filter name, operator and value, e.g. [ "id", "=", "v17" ]. All filters accept the (in)equality operators = and !=. Filters that support ordering also accept >=, >, <= and <. The full list of accepted filter names and values is documented below for each type of database item.

Simple predicates can be combined into larger queries with and/or predicates. These are represented as JSON arrays where the first element is either "and" or "or", followed by two or more other predicates.

Full example of a more complex visual novel filter (which, as of writing, doesn’t actually match anything in the database):

[ "and"
, [ "or"
  , [ "lang", "=", "en" ]
  , [ "lang", "=", "de" ]
  , [ "lang", "=", "fr" ]
  ]
, [ "olang", "!=", "ja" ]
, [ "release", "=", [ "and"
    , [ "released", ">=", "2020-01-01" ]
    , [ "producer", "=", [ "id", "=", "p30" ] ]
    ]
  ]
]

Besides the above JSON format, filters can also be represented as a more compact string. This representation is used in the URLs for the advanced search web interface² and is also accepted as value to the "filters" field. Since actually working with the compact string representation is kind of annoying, this API can convert between the two representations, so you can freely copy filters from the website to the API and the other way around.³

The compact representation of the above example is "03132gen2gde2gfr3hjaN180272_0c2vQN6830u" and can be seen in action in the web UI. The following command will convert that string back into the above JSON:

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/vn --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{
    "filters": "03132gen2gde2gfr3hjaN180272_0c2vQN6830u",
    "normalized_filters": true
}'

Note that the advanced search editing UI on the site does not support all filter types, for unsupported filters you will see an “Unrecognized filter” block. These are pretty harmless, the filter still works.

Filter flags

These flags are used in the documentation below to describe a few common filter properties.

Be careful with applying boolean algebra to filters with the ‘m’ or ‘i’ flags, the results may be unintuitive. For example, searching for releases matching ["or",["minage","=",0],["minage","!=",0]] will not find all releases in the database, but only those for which the minage field is known. Exact semantics regarding unknown or missing information often depends on how the filter is implemented and may be subject to change.

POST /vn

Query visual novel entries.

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/vn --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{
    "filters": ["id", "=", "v17"],
    "fields": "title, image.url"
}'

Accepted values for "sort": id, title, released, rating, votecount, searchrank.

Filters

The tag and dtag filters accept either a plain tag ID or a three-element array containing the tag ID, maximum spoiler level (0, 1 or 2) and minimum tag level (number between 0 and 3, inclusive), for example ["tag","=",["g505",2,1.2]] matches all visual novels that have a Donkan Protagonist with a vote of at least 1.2 at any spoiler level. If only an ID is given, 0 is assumed for both the spoiler and tag levels. For example, ["tag","=","g505"] is equivalent to ["tag","=",["g505",0,0]].

Fields

id

vndbid.

title

String, main title as displayed on the site, typically romanized from the original script.

alttitle

String, can be null. Alternative title, typically the same as title but in the original script.

titles

Array of objects, full list of titles associated with the VN, always contains at least one title.

titles.lang

String, language. Each language appears at most once in the titles list.

titles.title

String, title in the original script.

titles.latin

String, can be null, romanized version of title.

titles.official

Boolean.

titles.main

Boolean, whether this is the “main” title for the visual novel entry. Exactly one title has this flag set in the titles array and it’s always the title whose lang matches the VN’s olang field. This field is included for convenience, you can of course also use the olang field to grab the main title.

aliases

Array of strings, list of aliases.

olang

String, language the VN has originally been written in.

devstatus

Integer, development status. 0 meaning ‘Finished’, 1 is ‘In development’ and 2 for ‘Cancelled’.

released

Release date, possibly null.

languages

Array of strings, list of languages this VN is available in. Does not include machine translations.

platforms

Array of strings, list of platforms for which this VN is available.

image

Object, can be null.

image.id

String, image identifier.

image.url

String.

image.dims

Pixel dimensions of the image, array with two integer elements indicating the width and height.

image.sexual

Number between 0 and 2 (inclusive), average image flagging vote for sexual content.

image.violence

Number between 0 and 2 (inclusive), average image flagging vote for violence.

image.votecount

Integer, number of image flagging votes.

image.thumbnail

String, URL to the thumbnail.

image.thumbnail_dims

Pixel dimensions of the thumbnail, array with two integer elements.

length

Integer, possibly null, rough length estimate of the VN between 1 (very short) and 5 (very long). This field is only used as a fallback for when there are no length votes, so you’ll probably want to fetch length_minutes too.

length_minutes

Integer, possibly null, average of user-submitted play times in minutes.

length_votes

Integer, number of submitted play times.

description

String, possibly null, may contain formatting codes.

average

Raw vote average, between 10 and 100, null if nobody voted (cached, may be out of date by an hour).

rating

Bayesian rating, between 10 and 100, null if nobody voted (cached).

votecount

Integer, number of votes (cached).

screenshots

Array of objects, possibly empty.

screenshots.*

The above image.* fields are also available for screenshots.

screenshots.release.*

Release object. All release fields can be selected. It is very common for all screenshots of a VN to be assigned to the same release, so the fields you select here are likely to get duplicated several times in the response. If you want to fetch more than just a few fields, it is more efficient to only select release.id here and then grab detailed release info with a separate request.

relations

Array of objects, list of VNs directly related to this entry.

relations.relation

String, relation type.

relations.relation_official

Boolean, whether this VN relation is official.

relations.*

All visual novel fields can be selected here.

tags

Array of objects, possibly empty. Only directly applied tags are returned, parent tags are not included.

tags.rating

Number, tag rating between 0 (exclusive) and 3 (inclusive).

tags.spoiler

Integer, 0, 1 or 2, spoiler level.

tags.lie

Boolean.

tags.*

All tag fields can be used here. If you’re fetching tags for more than a single visual novel, it’s usually more efficient to only select tags.id here and then fetch (and cache) further tag information as a separate request. Otherwise the same tag info may get duplicated many times in the response.

developers

Array of objects. The developers of a VN are all producers with a “developer” role on a release linked to the VN. You can get this same information by fetching all relevant release entries, but if all you need is the list of developers then querying this field is faster.

developers.*

All producer fields can be used here.

editions

Array of objects, possibly empty.

editions.eid

Integer, edition identifier. This identifier is local to the visual novel and not stable across edits of the VN entry, it’s only used for organizing the staff listing (see below) and has no meaning beyond that. But this is subject to change in the future.

editions.lang

String, possibly null, language.

editions.name

String, English name / label identifying this edition.

editions.official

Boolean.

staff

Array of objects, possibly empty.

staff.eid

Integer, edition identifier or null when the staff has worked on the “original” version of the visual novel.

staff.role

String, see enums.staff_role in the schema JSON for possible values.

staff.note

String, possibly null.

staff.*

All staff fields can be used here.

va

Array of objects, possibly empty. Each object represents a voice actor relation. The same voice actor may be listed multiple times for different characters and the same character may be listed multiple times if it has been voiced by several people.

va.note

String, possibly null.

va.staff.*

Person who voiced the character, all staff fields can be used here.

va.character.*

VN character being voiced, all character fields can be used here.

extlinks

Array, links to external websites. Works the same as the ‘extlinks’ release field.

POST /release

Accepted values for "sort": id, title, released, searchrank.

Filters

The extlink filter can be used with three types of values:

• Just a site name, e.g. ["extlink","=","steam"] matches all releases that have a steam ID.
• A two-element array indicating the site name and the remote identifier, e.g. ["extlink","=",["steam",702050]] to match the Saya no Uta release on Steam. The second element can be either an int or a string, depending on the site, but integer identifiers are also accepted when formatted as a string.
• A URL, e.g. ["extlink","=","https://store.steampowered.com/app/702050/"] is equivalent to the above example.

In all of the above forms, an error is returned if the site is not known in the database or if the URL format is not recognized. The list of supported sites and URL formats tends to change over time, see GET /schema for the current list of supported sites.

Undocumented: animation

Fields

id

vndbid.

title

String, main title as displayed on the site, typically romanized from the original script.

alttitle

String, can be null. Alternative title, typically the same as title but in the original script.

languages

Array of objects, languages this release is available in. There is always exactly one language that is considered the “main” language of this release, which is only used to select the titles for the title and alttitle fields.

languages.lang

String, language. Each language appears at most once.

languages.title

String, title in the original script. Can be null, in which case the title for this language is the same as the “main” language.

languages.latin

String, can be null, romanized version of title.

languages.mtl

Boolean, whether this is a machine translation.

languages.main

Boolean, whether this language is used to determine the “main” title for the release entry.

platforms

Array of strings.

media

Array of objects.

media.medium

String.

media.qty

Integer, quantity. This is 0 for media where a quantity does not make sense, like “internet download”.

vns

Array of objects, the list of visual novels this release is linked to.

vns.rtype

The release type for this visual novel, can be "trial", "partial" or "complete".

vns.*

All visual novel fields are available.

producers

Array of objects.

producers.developer

Boolean.

producers.publisher

Boolean.

producers.*

All producer fields are available.

images

Array of objects, possibly empty.

images.*

All visual novel image.* fields are available here as well.

images.type

Image type, valid values are "pkgfront", "pkgback", "pkgcontent", "pkgside", "pkgmed" and "dig".

images.vn

Visual novel ID to which this image applies, usually null. This field is only useful for bundle releases that are linked to multiple VNs.

images.languages

Array of languages for which this image is valid, or null if the image is valid for all languages assigned to this release.

images.photo

Boolean.

released

Release date.

minage

Integer, possibly null, age rating.

patch

Boolean.

freeware

Boolean.

uncensored

Boolean, can be null.

official

Boolean.

has_ero

Boolean.

resolution

Can either be null, the string "non-standard" or an array of two integers indicating the width and height.

engine

String, possibly null.

voiced

Int, possibly null, 1 = not voiced, 2 = only ero scenes voiced, 3 = partially voiced, 4 = fully voiced.

notes

String, possibly null, may contain formatting codes.

gtin

JAN/EAN/UPC code, formatted as a string, possibly null.

catalog

String, possibly null, catalog number.

extlinks

Array, links to external websites. This list is equivalent to the links displayed on the release pages on the site, so it may include redundant entries (e.g. if a Steam ID is known, links to both Steam and SteamDB are included) and links that are automatically fetched from external resources (e.g. PlayAsia, for which a GTIN lookup is performed). These extra sites are not listed in the extlinks list of the schema.

extlinks.url

String, URL.

extlinks.label

String, English human-readable label for this link.

extlinks.name

Internal identifier of the site, intended for applications that want to localize the label or to parse/format/extract remote identifiers. Keep in mind that the list of supported sites, their internal names and their ID types are subject to change, but I’ll try to keep things stable.

extlinks.id

Remote identifier for this link. Not all sites have a sensible identifier as part of their URL format, in such cases this field is simply equivalent to the URL.

Missing: animation.

POST /producer

Accepted values for "sort": id, name, searchrank.

Filters

Fields

id

vndbid.

name

String.

original

String, possibly null, name in the original script.

aliases

Array of strings.

lang

String, primary language.

type

String, producer type, "co" for company, "in" for individual and "ng" for amateur group.

description

String, possibly null, may contain formatting codes.

Missing: External links, relations.

POST /character

Accepted values for "sort": id, name, searchrank.

Filters

The trait and dtrait filters accept either a plain trait ID or a two-element array containing the trait ID and maximum spoiler level. These work similar to the tag filters for visual novels, except that traits don’t have a rating.

Fields

id

vndbid.

name

String.

original

String, possibly null, name in the original script.

aliases

Array of strings.

description

String, possibly null, may contain formatting codes.

image.*

Object, possibly null, same sub-fields as the image visual novel field. (Except for thumbnail and thumbnail_dims because character images are currently always limited to 256x300px, but that is subject to change in the future).

blood_type

String, possibly null, "a", "b", "ab" or "o".

height

Integer, possibly null, cm.

weight

Integer, possibly null, kg.

bust

Integer, possibly null, cm.

waist

Integer, possibly null, cm.

hips

Integer, possibly null, cm.

cup

String, possibly null, "AAA", "AA", or any single letter in the alphabet.

age

Integer, possibly null, years.

birthday

Possibly null, otherwise an array of two integers: month and day, respectively.

sex

Possibly null, otherwise an array of two strings: the character’s apparent (non-spoiler) sex and the character’s real (spoiler) sex. Possible values are null, "m", "f", "b" (meaning “both”) or "n" (sexless).

vns

Array of objects, visual novels this character appears in. The same visual novel may be listed multiple times with a different release; the spoiler level and role can be different per release.

vns.spoiler

Integer.

vns.role

String, "main" for protagonist, "primary" for main characters, "side" or "appears".

vns.*

All visual novel fields are available here.

vns.release.*

Object, usually null, specific release that this character appears in. All release fields are available here.

traits

Array of objects, possibly empty.

traits.spoiler

Integer, 0, 1 or 2, spoiler level.

traits.lie

Boolean.

traits.*

All trait fields are available here.

Missing: instances, voice actor

POST /staff

Unlike other database entries, staff have more than one unique identifier. There is the main ‘staff ID’, which uniquely identifies a person and is what a staff page on the site represents.

Additionally, every staff alias also has its own unique identifier, which is referenced from other database entries to identify which alias was used. This identifier is generally hidden on the site and aliases do not have their own page, but the IDs are exposed in this API in order to facilitate linking VNs/characters to staff names.

This particular API queries staff names, not just staff entries, which means that a staff entry with multiple names can be included multiple times in the API results, once for each name they are known as. When searching or listing staff entries, this is usually what you want. When fetching more detailed information about specific staff entries, this is very much not what you want. The ismain filter can be used to remove this duplication and ensure you get at most one result per staff entry, for example:

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/staff --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{
    "filters": ["and", ["ismain", "=", 1], ["id", "=", "s81"] ],
    "fields": "lang,aliases{name,latin,ismain},description,extlinks{url,label}"
}'

Accepted values for "sort": id, name, searchrank.

Filters

Fields

id

vndbid.

aid

Integer, alias id.

ismain

Boolean, whether the ‘name’ and ‘original’ fields represent the main name for this staff entry.

name

String, possibly romanized name.

original

String, possibly null, name in original script.

lang

String, staff’s primary language.

gender

String, possibly null, "m" or "f".

description

String, possibly null, may contain formatting codes.

extlinks

Array, links to external websites. Works the same as the ‘extlinks’ release field.

aliases

Array, list of names used by this person.

aliases.aid

Integer, alias id.

aliases.name

String, name in original script.

aliases.latin

String, possibly null, romanized version of ‘name’.

aliases.ismain

Boolean, whether this alias is used as “main” name for the staff entry.

POST /tag

Accepted values for "sort": id, name, vn_count, searchrank.

Filters

Fields

id

vndbid.

name

String.

aliases

Array of strings.

description

String, may contain formatting codes.

category

String, "cont" for content, "ero" for sexual content and "tech" for technical tags.

searchable

Bool.

applicable

Bool.

vn_count

Integer, number of VNs this tag has been applied to, including any child tags.

Missing: some way to fetch parent/child tags. Not obvious how to do this efficiently because tags form a DAG rather than a tree.

POST /trait

Accepted values for "sort": id, name, char_count, searchrank.

Filters

Fields

id

vndbid

name

String. Trait names are not necessarily self-describing, so they should always be displayed together with their “group” (see below), which is the top-level parent that the trait belongs to.

aliases

Array of strings.

description

String, may contain formatting codes.

searchable

Bool.

applicable

Bool.

group_id

vndbid

group_name

String

char_count

Integer, number of characters this trait has been applied to, including child traits.

List Management

POST /ulist

Fetch a user’s list. This API is very much like POST /vn, except it requires the "user" parameter to be set and it has a different response structure. All visual novel filters can be used here.

If the user has visual novel entires on their list that have been deleted from the database, these will not be returned through the API even though they do show up on the website.

Accepted values for "sort": id, title, released, rating, votecount, voted, vote, added, lastmod, started, finished, searchrank.

Very important example on how to fetch Yorhel’s top 10 voted visual novels:

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/ulist --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{
    "user": "u2",
    "fields": "id, vote, vn.title",
    "filters": [ "label", "=", 7 ],
    "sort": "vote",
    "reverse": true,
    "results": 10
}'

Fields

id

Visual novel ID.

added

Integer, unix timestamp.

voted

Integer, can be null, unix timestamp of when the user voted on this VN.

lastmod

Integer, unix timestamp when the user last modified their list for this VN.

vote

Integer, can be null, 10 - 100.

started

String, start date, can be null, “YYYY-MM-DD” format.

finished

String, finish date, can be null.

notes

String, can be null.

labels

Array of objects, user labels assigned to this VN. Private labels are only listed when the user is authenticated.

labels.id

Integer.

labels.label

String.

vn.*

Visual novel info, all visual novel fields can be selected here.

releases

Array of objects, releases of this VN that the user has added to their list.

releases.list_status

Integer, 0 for “Unknown”, 1 for “Pending”, 2 for “Obtained”, 3 for “On loan”, 4 for “Deleted”.

releases.*

All release fields can be selected here.

GET /ulist_labels

Fetch the list labels for a certain user. Accepts two query parameters:

user

The user ID to fetch the labels for. If the parameter is missing, the labels for the currently authenticated user are fetched instead.

fields

List of fields to select. Currently only count may be specified, the other fields are always selected.

Returns a JSON object with a single key, "labels", which is an array of objects with the following members:

id

Integer identifier of the label.

private

Boolean, whether this label is private. Private labels are only included when authenticated with the listread permission. The ‘Voted’ label (id=7) is always included even when private.

label

String.

count

Integer. The ‘Voted’ label may have different counts depending on whether the user has authenticated.

Labels with an id below 10 are the pre-defined labels and are the same for everyone, though even pre-defined labels are excluded if they are marked private.

Example: Multi has only the default labels.

curl 'https://api.vndb.org/kana/ulist_labels?user=u1'

PATCH /ulist/<id>

Add or update a visual novel in the user’s list. Requires the listwrite permission. The JSON body accepts the following members:

vote

Integer between 10 and 100.

notes

String.

started

Date.

finished

Date.

labels

Array of integers, label ids. Setting this will overwrite any existing labels assigned to the VN with the given array.

labels_set

Array of label ids to add to the VN, any already existing labels will be unaffected.

labels_unset

Array of label ids to remove from the VN.

All members are be optional, missing members are not modified. A null value can be used to unset a field (except for labels).

The virtual labels with id 0 (“No label”) and 7 (“Voted”) can not be set. The “voted” label is automatically added/removed based on the vote field.

Wonky behavior alert: this API does not verify label ids and lets you add non-existent labels. These are not displayed on the website and not returned by POST /ulist, but they’re still stored in the database and may magically show up if a label with that id is created in the future. Don’t rely on this behavior, it’s a bug.

More wonky behavior: the website automatically unsets the other Playing/Finished/Stalled/Dropped labels when you select one of those, but this is not enforced server-side and the API lets you set all labels at the same time. This is totally not a bug.

Example to remove the “Playing” label, add the “Finished” label and vote a 6:

curl -XPATCH https://api.vndb.org/kana/ulist/v17 \
    --header 'Authorization: token hsoo-ybws4-j8yb9-qxkw-5obay-px8to-bfyk' \
    --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    --data '{"labels_unset":[1],"labels_set":[2],"vote":60}'

Or to remove an existing vote without affecting any of the other fields:

curl -XPATCH https://api.vndb.org/kana/ulist/v17 \
    --header 'Authorization: token hsoo-ybws4-j8yb9-qxkw-5obay-px8to-bfyk' \
    --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    --data '{"vote":null}'

Slightly unintuitive behavior alert: this API always adds the visual novel to the user’s list if it’s not already present, and that also applies to the above “removing a vote” example. Use DELETE if you want to remove a VN from the list.

PATCH /rlist/<id>

Add or update a release in the user’s list. Requires the listwrite permission. All visual novels linked to the release are also added to the user’s visual novel list, if they aren’t in the list yet. The JSON body accepts the following members:

status

Release status, integer. See releases.list_status in the POST /ulist fields for the list of possible values. Defaults to 0.

Example, to mark r12 as obtained:

curl -XPATCH https://api.vndb.org/kana/rlist/r12 \
    --header 'Authorization: token hsoo-ybws4-j8yb9-qxkw-5obay-px8to-bfyk' \
    --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    --data '{"status":2}'

DELETE /ulist/<id>

Remove a visual novel from the user’s list. Returns success even if the VN is not on the user’s list. Removing a VN also removes any associated releases from the user’s list.

curl -XDELETE https://api.vndb.org/kana/ulist/v17 \
    --header 'Authorization: token hsoo-ybws4-j8yb9-qxkw-5obay-px8to-bfyk'

DELETE /rlist/<id>

Remove a release from the user’s list. Returns success even if the release is not on the user’s list. Removing a release does not remove the associated visual novels from the user’s visual novel list, that requires separate calls to DELETE /ulist/<id>.

curl -XDELETE https://api.vndb.org/kana/rlist/r12 \
    --header 'Authorization: token hsoo-ybws4-j8yb9-qxkw-5obay-px8to-bfyk'

HTTP Response Codes

Successful responses always return either 200 OK with a JSON body or 204 No Content in the case of DELETE/PATCH requests, but errors may happen. Error response codes are typically followed with a text/plain or text/html body. The following is a non-exhaustive list of error codes you can expect to see:

Tips & Troubleshooting

“Too much data selected”

The server calculates a rough estimate of the number of JSON keys it would generate in response to your query and throws an error if that estimation exceeds a certain threshold, i.e. if the response is expected to be rather large. This estimation is entirely based on the "fields" and "results" parameters, so you can work around this error by either selecting fewer fields or fewer results.

List of identifiers

If you have a (potentially large) list of database identifiers you’d like to fetch, it is faster and more efficient to fetch 100 entries in a single API call than it is to make 100 separate API calls. Simply create a filter containing the identifiers, like in the following example:

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/vn --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{
  "fields": "title",
  "filters": ["or"
     , ["id","=","v1"]
     , ["id","=","v2"]
     , ["id","=","v3"]
     , ["id","=","v4"]
     , ["id","=","v5"] ],
  "results": 100
}'

Do not add more than 100 identifiers in a single query. You’ll especially want to avoid sending the same list of identifiers multiple times but with higher "page" numbers, see also the next point.

Pagination

While the API supports pagination through the "page" parameter, this is often not the most efficient way to retrieve a large list of entries. Results are sorted on "id" by default so you can also implement pagination by filtering on this field. For example, if the last item you’ve received had id "v123", you can fetch the next page by filtering on ["id",">","v123"].

This approach tends to not work as well when sorting on other fields, so "page"-based pagination is often still the better solution in those cases.

Random entry

Fetching a random entry from a database is, in general, pretty challenging to do in a performant way. Here’s one approach that can be used with the API: first grab the highest database identifier, then select a random number between 1 and the highest identifier (both inclusive) and then fetch the entry with that or the nearest increasing id, e.g.:

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/vn --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{
    "sort": "id",
    "reverse": true,
    "results": 1
}'

Then, assuming you’ve randomly chosen id v4567:

curl https://api.vndb.org/kana/vn --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{
    "filters": [ "id", ">=", "v4567" ],
    "fields": "title",
    "results": 1
}'

The result of the first query can be cached. Additional filters can be added to both queries if you want to narrow down the selection. This method has a slight bias in its selection due to the presence of id gaps, but you most likely don’t need perfect uniform random selection anyway.

Change Log

2024-09-09

• Add images field to POST /release.

2024-06-05

• Add average field to POST /vn.

2024-05-23

• Add extlinks field to POST /vn.

2024-05-18

• Add va field to POST /vn.

2024-05-11

• Add image{thumbnail,thumbnail_dims} fields to POST /vn. Beware: VN images can now be larger than 256x400px.

2024-03-13

• Add POST /staff.
• Add editions and staff fields to POST /vn.
• Add enums.staff_role and extlinks./staff members to GET /schema.

2023-11-20

• Add relations field to POST /vn.

2023-08-02

• Add developers field to POST /vn.

2023-07-11

• Deprecated popularity sort options for POST /ulist and POST /vn, it’s now equivalent to sorting on the reverse of votecount.
• Deprecated popularity filter and field for POST /vn.

2023-04-05

• Add searchrank sort option to all endpoints that have a search filter.

2023-03-19

• Add voiced, gtin and catalog fields to POST /release.

2023-01-17

• Add listwrite permission to API tokens.
• Add PATCH /ulist/<id>.
• Add PATCH /rlist/<id>.
• Add DELETE /ulist/<id>.
• Add DELETE /rlist/<id>.