APIs

In this page we introduce each one of the APIs inside the CARTO Platform

Connections

CARTO Connections API allows for programmatically managing (create, list, delete, or update) your connections to an external Data Warehouse

Link to API Reference

Tokens

The CARTO Tokens API allows the creation API Access Tokens that grant access to specific tables, tilesets and arbitrary queries using a specific connection in your CARTO organization.

An API Access Token allows to create map layers and fetch data from tables, tilesets or arbitrary SQL queries in public applications.

Link to API Reference

Maps

CARTO Maps API v3 allows the creation of map layers using data from different data warehouses. It uses an existing connection in your CARTO organization to access the data securely and is able to return layers in different formats.

Link to API Reference

SQL

CARTO SQL API v3 lets you run arbitrary queries in external data warehouses using an existing connection in your CARTO organization.

Link to API Reference

Imports

CARTO Imports API allows the creation of geospatial tables in an organization's CARTO Data Warehouse by importing files via URL. Once a file is imported, the resulting table can be previewed in Data Explorer and used in Builder and external applications to create maps.

When using the carto_dw connection in your CARTO organization it will create tables in your organization's data shared folder. Learn more about CARTO Data Warehouse here.

Currently, supported file formats are CSV, GeoJSON, GeoParquet, and Shapefile; This last one needs to be packaged in a .zip file.

Other supported Data Warehouses are BigQuery, Snowflake and PostgreSQL

There is a size limit to the files that can be imported. It's currently set at 1GB. Let us know if you need a higher limit.

Link to API Reference

Location Data Services (LDS)

CARTO Location Data Services API provides access to the following services:

  • Geocoding: Get coordinates from a street address

  • Batch geocoding: Get coordinates from a list of street addresses

  • Reverse geocoding: Get a street address from a pair of coordinates

  • Isolines: Get isoline geometries for different methods of transportation.

  • Routing: Get routing geometries for different methods of transportation

Link to API Reference

API rate limits

Our SaaS platform is protected with a web application firewall (WAF) that will automatically and temporarily block any IP that exceeds our API rate limits. Said API rate limits are:

  • Maps API: 3500 requests/minute

  • SQL API: 2500 requests/minute

  • LDS API: 3000 requests/minute

  • Import API: 500 requests/minute

  • Tokens API: 300 requests/minute

  • Connections API: 100 requests/minute

Cached requests (answered by our CDN) do not count towards this rate limit.

CARTO APIs will send a 429 HTTP response if the API request is over this limit.

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