EDI API Server Getting Started Guide

You can run our EDI conversion and parsing API server locally on your laptop or server using Docker or Java. The server does not connect to any external services. You will need a license key to run it.

The API documentation is available here.

See this post for a quick intro to our JSON schema/response format.

Installation Steps

Installation Using Docker

The API server runs in a single docker container without any dependencies. We recommend using docker compose to run it.

On Linux you may need to run sudo for all docker commands.

  • Install Docker engine if it is not installed on your system. Docker is preinstalled on most Linux systems.
  • Create a new folder (e.g., “edi”), download docker-compose.yml file from this link and copy it into this folder
  • Navigate to the folder where you saved the docker-compose.yml
  • Create the etc folder. Copy the license file to etc. You can request your trial license here.
  • Run docker compose up -d.

The default port for the container is 5080, you can change it in docker-compose.yml.

To stop the service, run docker compose down.

To view the logs, run docker compose logs.

For more details, refer to the documentation.

Installation Using Java

  • Download and install Java. Java 17 or higher is required. We recommend using the latest long-term support release of Java. You can also install Java using sdkman or a package manager on Linux or macOS. Once you install Java, verify the Java’s version by running java -version command from the terminal/command line window.
  • Create a folder/directory where you’re going to install the API back-end, e.g., edi
  • Create the etc folder inside the newly created folder. Copy the license file to etc. You can request your trial license here.
  • Download the distribution’s zip file from this link
  • Unzip the zip file into the installation folder/directory (e.g., into edi)
  • Open the terminal/command line window and navigate to the installation folder/directory (cd edi)
  • Run java -jar ediconvert.war

You need to keep this terminal/command line window open. To install the API server as a daemon/service, follow the instructions here.

Using the API

To verify that the server is running, open http://localhost:5080/api/about or run this command:

curl http://localhost:5080/api/about

The main API endpoint is http://localhost:5080/api/edi/json

You can test this endpoint by using this command:

curl -H "Content-Type: text/plain" --data-binary @<your file> http://localhost:5080/api/edi/json

See our API User Guide for more details.

Please follow examples in our GitHub repo for additional details. This repo contains examples for Python and curl as well as sample EDI files to test with.

EDI Viewer UI

The API server includes EDI Viewer UI, which is similar to our public/free EDI Viewer, but it has no limitations on the number of claims that you can view.

There is still a limit on the file size that you can load into the viewer, since all processing is done entirely in memory.

You can access your local version of the EDI Viewer at http://localhost:5080/edi-viewer.html.