API limits and documented unknowns
Understand the hosted demo API's visibility rules, pagination bounds, and operational guarantees that the contract does not define.
This page explains which results you can expect from the hosted Conduit demo and which operational behaviors you must not assume from the API contract. Use it when choosing the demo API for frontend development, deciding how to paginate results, or evaluating whether a local backend needs additional operational policy.
The public boundary
The OpenAPI contract names https://api.realworld.show/api as its server. The hosted service is intended for testing a frontend implementation with the Conduit API. It is not documented as a general-purpose API for an unrelated application.
The demo also limits which content is visible:
- Logged-out users see content created by demo accounts.
- Logged-in users see their own content and content created by demo accounts.
This visibility rule affects reads as well as the identifiers you can use in later requests. A valid article, profile, or feed item can appear to be missing when it is outside the current user's visible set. Treat 404 as a response about the current API view; do not infer that an identifier is globally absent.
The diagram describes visibility, not a promise about storage, durability, or deployment. A local backend implementing the same API contract can use a different data set and still be conforming for the HTTP behavior tested by the specification.
Pagination has two documented controls
Article lists and the followed-user feed accept these query parameters:
| Parameter | Type | Allowed values and default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
offset | integer | Minimum 0; no default is specified | Skips this many items before collecting the result set. |
limit | integer | Minimum 1; default 20 | Caps the number of items returned. |
articlesCount remains the total number of matching articles, independent of the current page. For example, request ?limit=1&offset=1 to skip the newest visible item and request the next one. When there are fewer visible items than the offset, expect an empty articles array rather than assuming the resource was deleted.
What the contract does not promise
The documented API surface defines resource operations, response shapes, authentication, and pagination parameters. It does not establish operational guarantees for rate limits, quotas, request-size limits, timeouts, retries, token expiry or refresh, persistence, backups, monitoring, or availability. Do not build client behavior that depends on any of these unless your selected backend documents and implements that policy separately.
This distinction matters when moving from the hosted demo to a local or production backend. Keep the API contract as the interoperability boundary, then document deployment and operational policy for the service that you operate. A frontend can handle documented HTTP errors and transport failures, but it cannot infer an availability or retry guarantee from a successful response schema.
Apply the limits safely
Use Pagination for articles and feeds when building list navigation, and treat articlesCount as the count for the current visible result set. Use Prerequisites and API environments to choose between the hosted server and a local backend. If a browser request fails before an HTTP response is available, follow Configure CORS for separate frontend and backend origins and Troubleshoot API and conformance failures.