Quickstart

Send your first message, add it to a Messageboard dashboard, and see it live in under 5 minutes.

Prerequisites

A Messageboard account
curl or any HTTP client

1. Create an API key

From your Messageboard account, create an API key and copy the raw key value.

export MB_API_KEY="mb_your_api_key_here"

For server-to-server integrations, send the key in the x-api-key header.

2. Send your first message

Create a message by POSTing to the messages endpoint. You can assign your own id or omit it to let Messageboard generate one.

curl -X POST https://msgboard.tech/api/messages \
  -H "x-api-key: $MB_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "id": "deploy-status",
    "content": "v2.4.1 deployed successfully. All health checks passing.",
    "contentType": "TEXT"
  }'

Response

{
  "data": {
    "id": "deploy-status",
    "content": "v2.4.1 deployed successfully. All health checks passing.",
    "contentType": "TEXT",
    "version": 1,
    "createdAt": "2026-03-25T20:00:00.000Z",
    "updatedAt": "2026-03-25T20:00:00.000Z"
  },
  "meta": {
    "requestId": "a1b2c3d4-...",
    "timestamp": "2026-03-25T20:00:00.000Z"
  }
}

Next, add a widget for deploy-status on your dashboard so the message has a visible display surface.

3. View the message

Fetch the latest version by ID:

curl https://msgboard.tech/api/messages/deploy-status \
  -H "x-api-key: $MB_API_KEY"

Open your Messageboard dashboard.
Add a widget for the deploy-status message name.
Save the layout if you want to keep the widget in a specific position.

Once that widget exists, every future version posted to deploy-status will update it.

5. Send a new version

POST again with the same id. Messageboard creates a new version automatically.

curl -X POST https://msgboard.tech/api/messages \
  -H "x-api-key: $MB_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "id": "deploy-status",
    "content": "v2.4.2 deployed. Rollback triggered due to elevated error rate on /api/checkout.",
    "contentType": "TEXT"
  }'

If you’ve already added a widget for deploy-status, it now shows version 2.

6. View version history

Fetch all versions for the message:

curl https://msgboard.tech/api/messages/deploy-status/versions \
  -H "x-api-key: $MB_API_KEY"

This returns versions in descending order, newest first.