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Quick Start Guide

Go from zero to your first data collection in under two minutes.

Prerequisites

  • A FourA account (sign up here)
  • Your API key (found in the Dashboard under Settings)

Step 1: Get Your API Key

After signing up, go to the Dashboard and navigate to Settings. Your API key appears there. Copy it. You'll need it for every request.

Step 2: Make Your First Request

Open a terminal and run this command (replace YOUR_API_KEY with your actual key):

curl -X POST https://eu.api.foura.ai/api/v1/tasks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "type": "single"}'

This sends a single HTTP request to example.com and returns the page HTML.

Step 3: Read the Response

You'll get back a JSON object with the collected data:

{
  "id": "task_abc123",
  "status": "completed",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "content": "<!doctype html><html>...</html>",
  "timing": {
    "total": 450,
    "ttfb": 230
  }
}

Key fields:

  • status: completed means success
  • statusCode: the HTTP status from the target site
  • content: the full HTML of the page
  • timing.total: total request time in milliseconds

Step 4: Try Different Task Types

FourA has three task types for different situations:

Type Speed Use When
single Fastest (~200ms–2s) Static pages, APIs, server-rendered sites
browser Medium (~2s–10s) JavaScript-heavy pages, SPAs, dynamic content
proxy Fast (~1s–5s) Sites with bot detection, geo-restricted content

Try a browser task:

curl -X POST https://eu.api.foura.ai/api/v1/tasks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "type": "browser",
    "options": {"waitFor": "body"}
  }'

What's Next

Last updated: April 8, 2026
Authentication & API Keys →