Mikrotik Api Examples Page

api = router.get_api()

import librouteros
import ssl
1. One-to-One Mapping with CLI
This is the API's greatest strength. If you know how to do something in the terminal (e.g., /ip firewall filter add chain=forward action=drop), you know how to do it in the API. There is no proprietary abstraction layer to learn. You send the command path and the arguments; the router executes it.
2. Speed and Efficiency
Unlike screen-scraping (SSH/Expect), the API is incredibly fast. It parses responses into a structured format (typically dictionaries/arrays in Python or hashes in Perl) instantly. You can query a router with 50,000 firewall entries and get a usable dataset back in seconds without the overhead of rendering a terminal interface. mikrotik api examples
3. The Ecosystem (Python Libraries)
The raw API is difficult to work with (it requires handling sockets, lengths, and end-of-sentence markers manually). However, the community has built excellent wrappers.
When fetching large tables (e.g., all firewall rules), specify only needed properties: api = router
# Bad: retrieves all 100+ fields
rules = api.path('ip', 'firewall', 'filter')
from librouteros import connect
from librouteros.exceptions import TrapError, ConnectionError
try:
api = connect(host='192.168.88.1', username='admin', password='wrong')
except TrapError as e:
print(f"RouterOS error: e")
except ConnectionError as e:
print(f"Network error: e")

curl -k -s -X PUT "https://$HOST:$PORT/rest/ip/firewall/filter" 

-b cookies.txt 

-H "content-type: application/json" 

-d '"chain":"input","protocol":"tcp","dst-port":"22","action":"drop","comment":"API added"'


queues = api('/queue/simple/print', '?name': 'user1')
if queues:
api('/queue/simple/remove', '.id': queues[0]['.id'])