Getting 403 forbidden error while authenticating with company house API.Please Help

API Issues
1

Getting 403 forbidden error while authenticating with company house API. Any help is much appreciated

2

Have you tried searching this forum for posts relating to that response code?

https://forum.companieshouse.gov.uk/search?q=403

3

This is a persisting problem with Edge - we can’t yet determine whether there is legacy IE buried in “all new” Edge that CH / AWS do not like or Edge is do advanced that it is taking offence with the CH / AWS servers. Other browsers are available and all work for us!

4

Yes, didn’t get much help

5

I have tried in chrome and edge, its not working in both browser

6

Well, if you hope to have people help out, you need to provide a bit of information - from searching the forum you’ll have seen that 403 responses can be received in a wide variety of situations:

  • If you exceed rate limits you will get 403 responses.
  • There are a couple of bugs / issues a Companies House which seem to cause 403 responses (one apparently browser-related as @frank mentioned)
  • I think there are other conditions you can receive 403 for as well.

I suggest posting exactly what you are trying to do (the big picture) and then the details of what you’re doing e.g. which “API” are you using? Are you calling from a server environment or client-side (javascript in the browser)? Which tool / language / framework / libraries are you using to try to authenticate? If on a server, is this e.g. a cloud service, or a cluster of servers? Have you registered the IPs / javascript domain names with Companies House? Are you using the sandbox (test) or live system? Which exact URL are you requesting? Have you checked the http response headers for the rate-limiting information to ensure you’ve not gone over your limit? etc.

Specific details might allow people to assist (e.g. lots of the help comes from people who are not part of Companies House and just post here like myself). The only thing you should not do is do not post any passwords / your API key in full.

Hope this helps.

7

We had a similar issue at the start and solved by adding API key with password. Try something like this: $apikey+ “:”

The sandbox only works if you populate it with test data, so use the live environment.