For over a year now, we have been actively working on the CloudConvert API v2. Today, we finally release the preview of API v2 for public testing.
Under the hood, v2 is a complete rewrite. We did some architectural changes which allow us to scale more efficient and to be more flexible for future extensions.
API v2 introduces Jobs. Each Job consists of at least one Task. For example: The first task of a job could be importing the file from a S3 bucket. The second task could be converting this file to a different format and the final task of the job could be exporting the file again to a S3 bucket. A single job can process multiple files and it is possible to do multiple operations with the same set of files. This often requested feature will help to increase the flexibility of using our API.
For some tasks, there are multiple engines available. For example, it is possible to convert DOCX files with the Office engine or the LibreOffice engine. The available options differ based on the used engine. Also, you can set an engine version to use. For example, you can set a fixed LibreOffice version to use which makes sure that this version is used, even if we update the default version of LibreOffice. There is an API for each task type available that shows the available engines, versions and their options.
With API v2 you can execute arbitrary FFMPEG, Imagemagick and Graphicsmagick commands. It is now also supported to use commands with multiple input files.
You can now create multiple API keys with different scopes. This allows fine granular access control. We have implemented an OAuth 2.0 server and it is possible to perform requests in behalf of clients, without asking for API keys.
The Sandbox API is a playground for development purposes and integration tests. It allows unlimited requests at no charge but with a fixed set of whitelisted input files only (via MD5 checksum).
There is much more that has changed. Check out the docs of API v2!
The API v2 is now available as "preview". This means the API v2 is not feature complete and there are still bugs. Please do not use v2 in production yet - we might need to temporary take it down or change endpoints without prior notice. However, we encourage you to try out API v2 and we would like to get your feedback! Is there something about API v1 you would like to get changed in v2? Now is the right time to tell us!
In the coming weeks we will update the official SDKs for v2 compatibility. The release of API v2 is planed later this year.
With the release of API v2 we will continue support of API v1 for at least two more years.