HTTP Statuses and Errors

HTTP statuses indicate if a request has been successful. The Datawrapper API responses will include standard HTTP statuses including error codes. You can find a great overview of HTTP status codes on https://httpstatuses.com.

To show you an example, the 418 client error is rather funny.

Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.

Since the Datawrapper API can not make tea (or coffee) you won't see this error code from its endpoints.

Others like 201 CREATED are very likely though, for example when creating a chart. Here are some of the status codes the Datawrapper API uses:

Code	Name	Type	Example
`200`	OK	Success	`GET` requests will return status `200` if everything was OK
`201`	Created		`POST` requests that create new resources (like a chart) will return with `201`.
`204`	No Content		`PUT` requests usually don't return anything since they replace the complete resource.
`301`	Moved permanently	Redirection	There is 1 permanent redirect where `/3` gets redirected to `/v3`
`400`	Bad request	Client error	Some invalid data was sent to the server. Additional information may be provided as error message.
`401`	Unauthorised		The API Access Token is invalid and authorisation failed. You can check if the `token` used has a typo or got revoked at some point. If you can't see it in app.datawrapper.de/account, it won't work.
`403`	Forbidden		You don't have access to the requested resource.
`404`	Not found		The requested resource was not found.
`409`	Conflict		There is a conflict with the target resource. This can happen if you try to create a resource with a unique identifier that already exists.

If you see any statuses in the 5xx (eg. 500 Internal server error) range, we probably did something wrong and this is a bug. It could be that the server is unavailable. Please contact us [email protected] in this case.