Access tokens

An access token is a string that encodes the security information used to authenticate and provide authorisation information to Signicat APIs. Your application sends the access token when making calls to Signicat APIs.

Token caching

We recommend that you cache access tokens when interacting with Signicat APIs. This helps to limit your network usage and resource overhead, whilst reducing traffic to Signicat servers.

For example, you can cache your access tokens using a memory cache, such as Redis or a simple in-memory cache. You then renew the tokens when they get close to the token expiration time.

If the access tokens fail, then you can configure your application to retry the request one more time.

Token lifetime

An access token has a relatively short lifetime. This is set to 600 seconds by default.

Once the access token expires, it can no longer be used. This is very important for security. To obtain a new access token, you need to send a new access token request.

You can edit the default token lifetime of your API client. To do this:

1. Go to Signicat Dashboard > Settings > API clients.
2. On your API client, click Edit.
3. On the Overview tab, set the desired value in the Access token lifetime field.
   Allowed values

   You can set a value from 1 to 3600 seconds.

4. Select Update to save the changes.