Skip to main content

PreviewThis site previews the LITS standard and platform.

Integrators & vendors

Integrating with LITS as a vendor

7 min read

Integrating with LITS is a thin adapter, not a rebuild. You keep your own product and database; you add a client that submits events to the registry and reads reference data back. Every vendor connects on the same open contract with its own key — no private agreement, no privileged access.

Authenticate per operator

Each integrated platform gets its own per-operator bearer key, so the registry attributes every submission to a known operator and can audit it. You pass the key on every call; the control-plane (admin) API is separate and you never call it.

The endpoints you use

Method & pathPurposeReturns
POST /v1/animalsRegister or identify an animalnational_id
POST /v1/movementsLodge a movement permit / consignmentpermit_reference
POST /v1/vaccinationsRecord a vaccination or disease eventid
POST /v1/certificatesRequest a registry-signed certificatereference, verify_url
GET /v1/zones?since_version=NPull veterinary/FMD zone reference datadelta of zones
GET /v1/verify/{token}Public certificate verification (no auth)sanitised status

Write reliably

  • Send an Idempotency-Key on every write so a retry never double-registers an animal or a permit.
  • Retry with backoff behind a per-registry circuit breaker; the registry returns the original result for a repeated key.
  • Read the acknowledgement ID on every write — national_id, permit_reference or id — and store it against your record.
  • Sync zones by version: keep the last server_version and request only the delta since then.
Certificates are requested by clients and signed by the registry. Your app prints or embeds from the signed payload — it never mints a national certificate itself. That single rule is what keeps an 'official' certificate meaningful.

Go from dry-run to live

  1. Build against the published OpenAPI contract using the sandbox and test keys.
  2. Run in dry-run: your adapter records what it would send, without making live calls, so you can verify mapping and volumes.
  3. Pass conformance: the public conformance suite checks your integration against the contract.
  4. Go live: receive a production per-operator key and flip the adapter from dry-run to live.

Stay forward-compatible

The contract is path-versioned (/v1). Additive, backward-compatible changes never break you — ignore the fields you do not consume. Breaking changes only ever ship under a new version, and every change is recorded in a public changelog you can follow.


More guides