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About the Identity API

The Central Archives Identity API allows external apps to get basic information about the user's ownership of a character, enumerate all of the user's characters the external app has access to, and to uniquely identify the user themselves.

The Identity API serves two main use cases:

  • Character authentication. The app or website wants to verify that the person using it owns a specific character, but doesn't care about user accounts on Central Archives itself.
  • User authentication. The app or website wants to use Central Archives as an identity provider for user accounts, and to offer the user the option to sign in with their Central Archives account, akin to a Google, Facebook, or Discord account, irrespective of any characters the user owns.

For these use cases, see the Character API and the User API respectively.

For XIVAuth Users

The Central Archives Identity API is based on a read-only subset of the draft specification for the XIVAuth API. It's intentionally very similar, differing only in case convention for JSON keys (XIVAuth uses snake_case, Central Archives uses camelCase). When XIVAuth launches, this should, in theory, let clients easily migrate from one API to the other.