Errors

In this guide, we will talk about what happens when something goes wrong while you work with the API. Mistakes happen, and mostly they will be yours, not ours. Let's look at some status codes and error types you might encounter.

You can tell if your request was successful by checking the status code when receiving an API response. If a response comes back unsuccessful, you can use the error type and error message to figure out what has gone wrong and do some rudimentary debugging (before contacting support).

Before reaching out to support with an error, please inspect the error message and response code. Most of the time, reported errors are, in fact, user errors. Please carefully check your code before contacting support.

Status codes

Here is a list of the different categories of status codes returned by the Verifiable API. Use these to understand if a request was successful.

Name
2xx
Description
A 2xx status code indicates a successful response.
Name
4xx
Description
A 4xx status code indicates a client error — this means it's a you problem.
Name
5xx
Description
A 5xx status code indicates a server error — you won't be seeing these.

Error format

Whenever a request is unsuccessful, the Verifiable API will return an error response with a message. You can use this information to understand better what has gone wrong and how to fix it. Most of the error messages are pretty helpful and actionable.

Here is the format of our error responses, it's pretty simple.

Name
error
Description
Message describing the error and what went wrong.

Error response

{
  "error": "You are not authorized to access this resource"
}