Launching Your First xAPI Integration

Why xAPI, and Why Sereni LRS

xAPI (Experience API) lets any learning application — an LMS, a mobile app, a simulation, or a custom tool — describe what a learner did as a simple, structured statement: an actor, a verb, and an object. Sereni LRS is the record store that receives, validates and makes sense of every one of those statements.

Unlike SCORM, xAPI isn't tied to a course player, so you can track learning wherever it happens. This guide walks through connecting your first source system to Sereni LRS and confirming data is flowing correctly.

Step 1 — Create Your API Key

From your Sereni LRS dashboard, open Settings → API Keys and generate a new key scoped to a Store. Keep this key secret — it authenticates every statement your application sends. The authentication reference covers both schemes, the required version header, and how to rotate a key without downtime.

Step 2 — Send Your First Statement

Post a single xAPI statement to the ingestion endpoint to confirm connectivity. Substitute your own deployment's hostname and Store slug — the xAPI endpoint is not a shared public address, and every request is scoped to a Store:

curl -X POST https://your-lrs-host.example.com/YOUR_STORE/xAPI/statements \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "actor": { "mbox": "mailto:[email protected]" },
    "verb": { "id": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/verbs/completed" },
    "object": { "id": "https://acme.com/courses/safety-101" }
  }'

Step 3 — Validate in the Statement Explorer

Open the Statement Explorer inside Sereni LRS and search by actor or activity ID. You should see your test statement within seconds, along with its validation status and full JSON payload. If it was rejected instead, the validation rules name the field at fault.

Step 4 — Go Live

Once your integration is sending statements reliably, switch to a production API key, point your traffic at your live Store, and set up a dashboard to monitor ingestion volume. From here, every learning interaction becomes part of your analytics. Before you scale up, xAPI validation best practices covers the mistakes that are cheap to fix now and expensive to fix after a year of data.