Needle API

Name: Needle API API
Brand: Needle API
Availability: InStock

★ Only Publicly Available OpenAPI DocumentAI/MLEmbeddings SearchapiKey10 EndpointsREST

For Agents

Create RAG collections, ingest files via signed upload URLs, and run semantic search across documents through Needle's hosted vector store.

Connect the Needle API to your agent

Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Needle API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.

Install Jentic One Beta (Self-Hosted)

Jentic One Host machine

# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh

Agent machine

# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register       # connects your agent to your Jentic One instance

Jentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.

Capabilities

What an agent can do with Needle API API.

Create and list RAG collections through POST /collections and GET /collections

Add files to a collection from signed URLs via POST /collections/{collectionId}/files

Run semantic search across indexed content with POST /collections/{collectionId}/search

Inspect collection statistics including file count and indexing status via /collections/{collectionId}/stats

GET STARTED

Start building with Needle API API

Explore with Jentic

View OpenAPI Document

Jentic publishes the only available OpenAPI document for Needle API, keeping it validated and agent-ready.

Jentic publishes the only available OpenAPI specification for Needle API, keeping it validated and agent-ready. The Needle API is a RAG-as-a-Service platform that lets developers create collections, attach files, and run semantic search without managing their own vector store or embedding pipeline. The 10 endpoints cover collection lifecycle, file ingestion via signed upload URLs, collection statistics, and a search endpoint that returns ranked passages from the indexed content. Authentication uses an x-api-key header issued from the Needle dashboard.

Use Cases

Patterns agents use Needle API API for, with concrete tasks.

★ Hosted Knowledge Base for a Support Bot

A support team builds a knowledge base by creating a Needle collection, uploading help-center PDFs and policy documents through the signed upload URL flow, and querying it from a chatbot via /collections/{collectionId}/search. Needle handles chunking, embedding, and retrieval, returning ranked passages the bot uses to ground its answers. Time-to-first-answer is typically under an hour for a small knowledge base.

POST /collections to create the collection, upload PDFs via the signed URL flow, then POST /collections/{collectionId}/search with the user question.

Document Search for an Internal Tool

An internal tool surfaces an enterprise's policy and SOP documents to employees without indexing them on a self-managed vector database. The team uploads the documents to Needle and exposes a single search box backed by /collections/{collectionId}/search. Adding new documents is a matter of generating a fresh upload URL and POSTing the file reference to the collection.

POST /files/upload-url to get a signed URL, upload the SOP, then POST /collections/{collectionId}/files with the returned file reference.

Per-Tenant RAG for a SaaS Product

A SaaS vendor gives each tenant its own Needle collection so customer documents stay isolated from each other. The vendor's app provisions a collection on tenant signup, ingests files as the customer uploads them, and runs scoped search at query time. The /stats endpoint surfaces ingestion progress to the customer dashboard.

POST /collections with the tenant id in the name, then route every customer search through that collection's /search endpoint.

Agent-Driven RAG Setup

An AI agent that needs to ground itself in a customer's documents uses Jentic to create a Needle collection, ingest files, and search them without rebuilding the upload-URL choreography. The agent searches for the right operation, loads the schema, and submits each call while Jentic handles the x-api-key header.

Search Jentic for 'search a Needle collection', load the schema for /collections/{collectionId}/search, and execute it with the user question.

Key Endpoints

10 endpoints — jentic publishes the only available openapi specification for needle api, keeping it validated and agent-ready.

METHOD

PATH

DESCRIPTION

POST

/collections

Create a collection

GET

/collections

List collections

GET

/collections/{collectionId}/stats

Get collection stats

POST

/collections/{collectionId}/files

Add files to a collection

POST

/collections/{collectionId}/search

Search a collection

GET

/files/upload-url

Get a signed file upload URL

GET

/files/download-url

Get a signed file download URL

POST

/collections

Create a collection

GET

/collections

List collections

GET

/collections/{collectionId}/stats

Get collection stats

POST

/collections/{collectionId}/files

Add files to a collection

POST

/collections/{collectionId}/search

Search a collection

Why though Jentic?

Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.

Credential isolation

Needle x-api-key values are stored encrypted in the Jentic vault. Agents receive a scoped access token at execution time, so the raw API key never enters the agent's context.

Intent-based discovery

Agents search by intent such as 'search a Needle collection' and Jentic returns the matching operation with its input schema, removing the need to read the Needle docs site.

Time to first call

Direct Needle integration: half a day to wire collection creation, signed-URL upload, and search. Through Jentic: under 30 minutes to run an end-to-end RAG flow with managed credentials.

Related APIs

Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.

Alternative

Pinecone

Self-served vector database with explicit index, namespace, and embedding control

Use when the agent needs custom embedding models or low-level vector index control rather than Needle's hosted RAG primitives.

Alternative

Chroma

Open-source vector store with a hosted API

Use when the project prefers an open-source-backed vector store over Needle's hosted-only model.

Complementary

OpenAI

Language models that consume the passages Needle returns

Use alongside Needle when the agent grounds GPT-class model responses in retrieved passages.

FAQs

Specific to using Needle API API through Jentic.

Why is there no official OpenAPI spec for Needle API?

Needle publishes its API as developer documentation rather than a formal OpenAPI file. Jentic generates and maintains this spec so that AI agents and developers can call Needle API via structured tooling. It is validated against the live api.needle.app endpoints and kept up to date. Get started at https://app.jentic.com/sign-up.

What authentication does the Needle API use?

Needle uses an apiKey scheme via the x-api-key header. Generate the key from the Needle dashboard and send it on every request to api.needle.app/api/v1. Through Jentic the key is stored encrypted in the vault and injected at execution time, so the raw key never enters agent context.

Can I run semantic search with the Needle API?

Yes. POST /collections/{collectionId}/search with the natural-language query and any filters. Needle returns ranked passages from the indexed files in the collection, suitable for grounding an LLM response or surfacing in a search UI.

What are the rate limits for the Needle API?

Needle does not publish numeric per-endpoint rate limits in the OpenAPI document; tier limits are governed by the workspace plan in the Needle dashboard. Expect 429 responses on bursts on the free tier and back off; contact Needle for higher limits on paid plans.

How do I add a file to a Needle collection through Jentic?

Run pip install jentic, then search for 'add a file to a Needle collection', load the schemas for GET /files/upload-url and POST /collections/{collectionId}/files, and execute them in sequence with the file reference returned by the upload.

Does the Needle API host the underlying vector database?

Yes. Needle manages embeddings, chunking, and the vector index for you. The API exposes only collection, file, and search primitives rather than raw vector operations, so you do not configure dimensions, indices, or namespaces.