Realms

Overview

The realm tells the backend which clearing-house context a request is made in. Realm values are environment-qualified: a realm is not the same thing as a clearing house — the clearing house is the application; the realm is the context identifier for one environment of it.

How the realm travels depends on the endpoint generation: v2013 endpoints take it as the Realm HTTP header; v2023 endpoints take it as the realm query parameter. Each endpoint's page states the value to use for this site's environment.

Application Realms

Application	Development Realm	Production Realm
ABS Clearing-House (ABSCH)	abs-dev	abs
Biosafety Clearing-House (BCH)	bch-dev	bch
Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM)	chm-dev	chm
Online Reporting Tool (ORT)	ort-dev	ort

Each environment (api.cbd.int for production, api.cbddev.xyz for development) has its own realm configurations, roles and authentication tokens; tokens from one environment are not valid in the other.