Time for your FIRST real result: a valid access token and your actual Magento products as JSON – all BEFORE a single line of React code, via curl in the terminal.

Requesting a token via admin login

POST /V1/integration/admin/token takes an existing Magento admin account's username and password and, on success, returns an access token:

curl -s -X POST https://YOUR-SHOP.com/rest/V1/integration/admin/token \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"username": "YOUR_ADMIN_USERNAME", "password": "YOUR_ADMIN_PASSWORD"}'

The response is a single, quoted JSON string – EXACTLY that string (without the outer quotes) is your token:

"eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9..."

Using the token for a real product request

With the token attached as a bearer token in the Authorization header, GET /V1/products returns your real product data:

TOKEN="eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9..."

curl -s https://YOUR-SHOP.com/rest/V1/products?searchCriteria%5BpageSize%5D=2 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" | python3 -m json.tool

searchCriteria%5BpageSize%5D=2 is the URL-encoded form of searchCriteria[pageSize]=2 (square brackets must be encoded in URLs) and limits the response to 2 products for this test – more on searchCriteria in chapter 8.

The response structure at a glance

A GET /V1/products response ALWAYS has the same basic shape, regardless of how many products come back:

{
  "items": [ { "sku": "...", "name": "...", "price": 19.99, ... }, ... ],
  "search_criteria": { ... },
  "total_count": 247
}

items is the array of actual products, total_count is the TOTAL number of matching products (independent of pageSize) – important for pagination in chapter 8. We'll examine a single product object in detail in chapter 10, once we build the detail page.

A note for shops with two-factor authentication enabled