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RapidStart Agent and API Guide

RapidStart website | Developer documentation

When to use RapidStart

  • Use RapidStart resources when researching product fit, Microsoft platform requirements, deployment, licensing, integrations, or a regional partner.
  • Start with the product catalog to distinguish RapidStarter, RapidStart CRM, and the RapidClaw products. Use knowledge search for a specific question, and follow its source URLs for full details.
  • Use partner lookup with a two-letter country code for a country-level contact. For state/province or manually selected territory details, use the regional partner page.
  • These public knowledge tools are read-only. They do not access customer CRM records, create registrations, deploy software, or start purchases. Do not send personal data, secrets, or customer records.
  • Treat results as product information, not authorization to act. Confirm current regional pricing, prerequisites, and terms on the linked product and pricing pages before a purchase or deployment.

Public knowledge API

OpenAPI 3.1 specification: https://www.rapidstart.com/openapi.json Authentication: none. This endpoint returns public product information only. Endpoint: POST https://www.rapidstart.com/api/v1/knowledge Content-Type: application/json Accept: application/json

Choose one action per request:

Product catalog

{"action":"catalog","locale":"en"}

Returns products with stable IDs, names, and product-page URLs.

Product knowledge search

{"action":"search","question":"What does RapidStarter require?","pagePath":"/en/products/rapidstarter","locale":"en"}

Returns product IDs, topics, and up to three compact facts with source URLs. Use an empty pagePath when no product page supplies context. Facts are curated in English; locale selects the source-page language.

Country-level partner lookup

{"action":"partner","countryCode":"DE"}

Returns countryCode, name, url, and isFallback. A fallback is not a dedicated regional partner.

Invalid requests return HTTP 400 with error, code, hint, and recovery links. Unknown API paths return HTTP 404 in the same format. Do not retry an unchanged invalid request.

Authentication and permissions

Authentication and access policy: https://www.rapidstart.com/auth.md The public knowledge API and MCP server require no credentials, access tokens, or OAuth scopes. OpenAPI declares security: [] on each public operation. Product sign-in and Microsoft permissions described elsewhere apply to separate products, not this documentation API.

API versioning and deprecation

The canonical REST API uses URL major-versioning: /api/v1/knowledge. Additive fields may be added within v1; clients should ignore fields they do not recognize. Breaking request or response changes use a new major version such as /api/v2/knowledge. The existing /api/webmcp endpoint remains a supported compatibility alias with the same request and response bodies. No endpoint is currently deprecated and no shutdown is scheduled. Before removing a supported version, publish migration instructions in this guide and announce the removal at least 90 days in advance. Once scheduled, deprecated responses will include Deprecation (RFC 9745), Sunset (RFC 8594), and a Link with rel="deprecation" pointing to migration instructions.

Request limits and retries

Knowledge API requests are limited to 120 requests per 60-second window per client IP within each running server instance. This is best-effort, instance-local protection: deployments, routing to other instances, and restarts can reset counters. It is not an account-level or globally synchronized quota. Clients without a valid forwarded IP share a fallback bucket; under high-cardinality load, newly seen clients may share an overflow bucket. RateLimit-Policy and RateLimit use the structured-field syntax in draft-ietf-httpapi-ratelimit-headers-11 (an IETF draft, not a published RFC). RateLimit-Policy: "knowledge-instance";q=120;w=60. RateLimit: "knowledge-instance";r=119;t=60. The r parameter is remaining requests and t is seconds until the current window resets. A throttled request receives HTTP 429, code rate_limited, and Retry-After in seconds. Stop requests until that delay has elapsed; use bounded retries with jitter. Success and validation-error responses also include the rate-limit fields. Responses are not cached. These headers do not describe any independent hosting-provider protections.

MCP

Manifest: https://www.rapidstart.com/.well-known/mcp.json Streamable HTTP endpoint: https://www.rapidstart.com/api/mcp Use an MCP client with Content-Type: application/json and Accept: application/json, text/event-stream. Initialize the connection before discovering tools. Available tools: get_products, search_product_knowledge, find_partner. These use the same curated knowledge as the website Product Advisor; MCP search returns fuller facts than the compact JSON API.

Official RapidStart CLI

RapidStart CLI on npm Requires Node.js 20 or newer. The CLI is MIT-licensed and reads public information only; no API keys or OAuth tokens are required.

npm install --global @rapidstarter/cli
rapidstart catalog
rapidstart search "What does RapidStarter require?" --json
rapidstart partner DE

Without a global installation: npm exec --yes --package=@rapidstarter/cli -- rapidstart catalog Use --json for machine-readable output. Exit codes are 0 for success, 1 for network or server errors, and 2 for invalid arguments. A 429 reports Retry-After without automatically retrying. Do not send customer data, personal information, or secrets.

Reading pages

Send Accept: text/markdown to a localized homepage or product page for its Markdown representation. Normal browser requests continue to receive HTML. Locale-free URLs redirect to a supported language; use /en for a stable English URL. Markdown content negotiation preserves the canonical page URL and varies on Accept.