Quick Start 5 min

Make your first WorkAxle API call against staging in about five minutes. By the end, you'll have run a GraphQL query and you'll know where to go next to explore the full surface interactively.

Prerequisites

You need three things:

1. A staging account. Contact your WorkAxle account team or partnership manager — there is no self-serve sandbox today.
2. Auth0 credentials — a client ID and client secret tied to your staging account. The Authentication page covers how those are issued.
3. A terminal with curl installed. Everything below uses curl so it copy-pastes anywhere.

You don't need to install anything from WorkAxle. There's no SDK to download.

Step 1 — Get an access token

Exchange your Auth0 credentials for a bearer token. The token is short-lived (typically one hour) and goes on every subsequent request.

## exchange client credentials for a bearer token
curl -X POST 'https://workaxle-staging.us.auth0.com/oauth/token' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "grant_type": "client_credentials",
    "client_id": "YOUR_CLIENT_ID",
    "client_secret": "YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET",
    "audience": "https://api.staging.workaxle.com/v1"
  }'

The audience is a fixed Auth0 API identifier — the same value for every surface (REST and both GraphQL schemas authenticate with one token). Its /v1 suffix is not an API route and is unrelated to API versioning: REST endpoints live under /api/v1/, GraphQL under /v2/..., but both are called with this single https://api.staging.workaxle.com/v1 audience token.

{
  "access_token": "eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIs...",
  "token_type": "Bearer",
  "expires_in": 3600
}

Copy the access_token — you'll use it as $TOKEN below.

Step 2 — Run your first query

Ask the API who you are. The me query is the simplest authenticated call: it confirms your token works and returns your user record.

curl -X POST 'https://api.staging.workaxle.com/v2/graphql' \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "query": "query Me { me { id profile { firstName lastName email } } }"
  }'

{
  "data": {
    "me": {
      "id": "...",
      "profile": {
        "firstName": "Alex",
        "lastName": "Doe",
        "email": "alex@example.com"
      }
    }
  }
}

That's it — you've made an authenticated GraphQL call against WorkAxle.

What if it didn't work?

Step 3 — Explore interactively

The fastest way to learn the rest of the surface is to open the live GraphQL explorer. WorkAxle ships a built-in GraphiQL IDE on each schema endpoint: