Creating your first RingCentral App
What is RingCentral?
RingCentral is a cloud-based communication and collaboration platform. It provides unified voice, video, team messaging and collaboration, conferencing, online meetings, digital customer engagement, and integrated contact center solutions.
RingCentral comes with an extended set of APIs that can be used by other developers to interact with RingCentral. These APIs are very powerful and can do loads of things depending on your use case.
More details on RingCentral APIs can be found here
https://developers.ringcentral.com/api-reference/
What are developer apps in RingCentral
At RingCentral, for anyone to integrate with the APIs, create a bot, or even to integrate with the RingCentral App, you need to create an app.
You can create developer apps via RingCentral’s developer portal at https://developers.ringcentral.com/.
Log in to the developer portal either using your RingCentral production account credential or sign up for a Free Tier account.
RingCentral lets you create developer apps to play with the APIs even with a Free Tier account.
Note that the developer apps created using the Free Tier account can only run in the sandbox environment and cannot be promoted to production.
Let’s create your first app
Our goal — Get the account info using the API
1. To create your first app, go to https://developers.ringcentral.com/ and click on “Sign In | Sign Up”.
2. Click on “Sign In” and sign in using your production account or your free tier account.
3. Click on the “Console” tab on top and select the “Apps” tab on the left panel. This will list all your existing apps.
Click on the “Create App” button
4. This will take you through the app creation wizard. Depending on your use case, you can select what type of app you are creating. Since we just want to consume the get account info API, we would be creating a REST API app. Hit next.
5. Next you configure your app by filling in the details
- App Name: The name of your app that will be displayed in the developer console/internal use and will not be displayed publicly.
- Display Name: This will be the official public name of your app and will be used in authorization flow and other administrative contexts.
- App Description: A small description about the app to give context. This will also not be displayed publicly.
- App Icon - Image that will be used in places like authorization flow, message posted by bot add-in, etc.
- Primary Contact: Contact person that will receive important emails and notifications related to the operation and health of the app.
- Do you intend to promote this app in the RingCentral App Gallery? : Indicates if you want to advertise your app on the RingCentral App Gallery for others to be able to use. This adds no functionality but helps in providing better support.
- Auth: The authorization flow for your app
You could either select 3-legged OAuth flow authorization code which is oauth flow via temporary authorization token or password-based auth flow which is password-based and more ideal for server-side apps or apps that do not have a user interface.
For the sake of simplicity, we would use password-based auth since we will not be having an interactive user interface
- App Permissions: Defined what permissions your app will have. Different APIs need different permissions. This information on permissions on every endpoint can be found in the API document https://developers.ringcentral.com/api-reference/
We will add “ReadAccount” permission since getting account info API will need that permission https://developers.ringcentral.com/api-reference/Company/readAccountInfo
- Who will be authorized to access your app? : You can choose if all customers of RingCentral can use this app or is intended to be used by only your account.
Note: Apps using password-based auth can only be private
Once you fill in the details, click “Create”
Congratulations! 🎉 You have successfully created your first RingCentral app. Felt like a piece of cake, didn't it? Well, it was :D
Now, by default, your app is created in the sandbox environment. RingCentral lets you play around and fiddle with your app in a sandbox and you can promote it to production whenever you are ready.
You can see 3 important pieces of information in your app dashboard which are Client Id, Client Secret, and Account ID which will be used when authorizing your app to consume the APIs
You can always go back to “Settings” and change the details of your app including the security permissions as long as the app is in the sandbox environment.
Now that our app is ready, let’s try to consume the account info API.
To do so, we can simply go to the API document which has an interactive option to test the endpoint https://developers.ringcentral.com/api-reference/Company/readAccountInfo
Click on “Try it out” and select your app and click “Authorize” to authorize your application to start consuming the endpoint.
Once that is done, click on “Try it out” again and Voila. You can now see a response of the get account info endpoint with your data on the right-hand side of the page.
You can also choose to use postman or any other client to make these API calls. You would first need to generate an access token using the authentication API https://developers.ringcentral.com/api-reference/Get-Token
🎉 Congratulations on creating your first RingCentral app! You are now equipped with all the tools and knowledge to change permission, try out other APIs, and integrate with RingCentral. Happy hacking!
Please let us know what you think by leaving your questions and comments below. To learn even more about other features we have make sure to visit our developer site and if you’re ever stuck make sure to go to our developer forum.
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