Skip to main content
Ed-Fi.orgDocsCommunityAcademy
Version: 8.0

Configuration

Ed-Fi API v8 consists of two separately configured services, each with its own appsettings.json:

  • Ed-Fi API — handles the Ed-Fi REST API (resources, descriptors, discovery, and OAuth token validation). The primary configuration file is appsettings.json in the Ed-Fi API application.
  • Configuration Service — handles the management API (vendors, applications, claim sets, data stores, and identity). Configuration is also stored in appsettings.json.

By customizing these files you can adjust database connections, authentication providers, multi-tenancy behavior, logging verbosity, and other runtime options. For a full listing of available settings and their defaults, see Configuration Details.

Both services support environment variable overrides using the standard ASP.NET Core double-underscore __ separator for hierarchical keys. Environment variables take priority over appsettings.json. For example:

AppSettings__Datastore=mssql
RateLimit__PermitLimit=1000

In the provided Docker Compose setup, these overrides are managed through the .env file in eng/docker-compose/. See Getting Started — Appendix for the complete .env variable reference.

The identity provider (self-contained OpenIddict or Keycloak) has its own configuration section. See Identity Provider for details.

Logging is configured separately. See Logging Configuration for log levels, PII masking, and correlation IDs.

Security Configuration​

In addition to the application settings above, Ed-Fi API v8 allows implementers to configure several aspects of security:

  • Claim Sets. Claim sets provide fine-grained access control over which resources a client application can read and write. Claim sets are managed through the Configuration Service API.
  • API Profiles. Profiles allow implementers to define data policies that specify exactly what access is permitted for a particular client application type. For example, a student information system might require broad access to student, grade, and attendance data, while a gradebook application needs access only to a subset of those resources.

For more detail on security configuration, see the Security section of this documentation.