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 be aware that 99% of all reported errors are, in fact, user errors. Therefore, please carefully check your code before contacting Selly support.

Status codes

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

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

Error types

Whenever a request is unsuccessful, the Selly API will return an error response with an error 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.

Validation errors will feature a errors attribute containing an error of validation error messages.

Error Response

{
  "message": "An example error message",
}

Validation Error Response

{
  "message": "Validation failed",
  "errors": [
    "Title can't be blank",
    "Title is too short (minimum is 2 characters)",
    "Title must be present"
  ]
}