Developer guide

Everything you need to know to get your Nylas integration up and running, and tools to make your development cycle faster, easier, and more efficient.

What is Nylas?

Nylas is a set of integration APIs and tools that let you to quickly add email, calendar, and contacts functionality to an application you're writing. Nylas also offers a Scheduler, so you can allow people outside your organization to book meetings with you, or a group of people.

What's an "organization"?

An organization represents a company within the Nylas platform. It's a collection of Nylas applications and Dashboard accounts that are linked together and paid for in the same way. Billing, support, data usage, and feature enablement are handled at the organization level.

Adding Nylas to your application

Nylas provides a REST style API that allows you to integrate using any HTTP library that can make REST style queries. The API accepts and returns JSON objects on every endpoint, so interactions with Nylas are predictable and straightforward. However if you're using more than a few features, you might want to use one of the Nylas maintained SDKs.

The Nylas SDKs make it easy to use the REST APIs in whatever language you're developing with. Check out the Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Kotlin/Java SDKs. There are also a selection of community-maintained SDKs.

Providers and integrations

No two email providers are alike, and so Nylas maintains a series of Provider Guides to help you through the requirements for connecting to Google, Microsoft, iCloud, and Yahoo.

Nylas also integrates with both Zoom and Microsoft Teams so you can add online conferencing options to your calendar invitations.

Authentication and user account management

The most important first step in setting up Nylas is authentication. First you choose how you want to authenticate, then set up a limited authentication so you can build and test the email, calendar, and contacts functionality that you want to use in your application. When you're confident that your application is ready, you can set up to authenticate more users.

Once your application is finished and in production use, the main administrative work you'll do is in managing connected accounts (or grants), for example when their tokens expire or their access changes.

API docs, error codes and rate limits

Once you have authentication set up, use the Nylas APIs to make requests on behalf of the user to access their email, calendars, and contacts.

The API documentation is available for v3 Administration APIs, v3 Email, Calendar, and Contacts APIs, and API v2.x.

You can also learn more about the Nylas API rate limits, API error codes, supported providers, and API versioning.

Learn about common API error codes and how to solve them, and API rate limits and how to work within them.

Implementing with Webhooks and Deltas

Once you have your application making queries and requests, you might also want to know when things happen on your service provider. To do that, you can set up a service to receive Webhooks, and for larger groups of changes you can check for Deltas.

Webhooks listen for events so you can automatically trigger reactions. You can use webhooks for notifications about things happening in your app, such as when someone books a room, connects a new account, or clicks a link in a message.

See the Webhooks overview, Webhooks best practices, and the list of webhook schemas.

Nylas code samples

Visit the Nylas code samples repository for reference implementations of some of the most common features and use cases.

Coding with Nylas and the Nylas Blog

Check out the Coding with Nylas YouTube channel, hosted by our intrepid DevRel team.

We also have some helpful demos and tutorials on the Nylas Developer Blog.