Production Tips

Postman Collection

Import the official collection to explore every endpoint with pre-built environments, example payloads, and scripting helpers.

1. Download the Near Space Labs Postman collection.
2. Import into Postman and set NSL_ID + NSL_SECRET env vars.
3. Hit "Send" to test auth, surveys, coverage, and tile downloads in minutes.

Best Practices

• Use If-None-Match headers when caching tile responses to avoid re-downloads.
• Batch coverage queries by AOI to find the minimal set of tiles before downloading.
• Rotate tokens proactively and alert on 401/403 responses to catch expired credentials quickly.
• Cache footprints — geometry rarely changes once a survey is published.
• Page through surveys efficiently — the default page size is 25. Only fetch what you need.
• Use v2 endpoints — legacy /tile/surveys routes emit deprecation warnings.

Token Management

import time

class TokenManager:
    def __init__(self, nsl_id, nsl_secret):
        self.nsl_id = nsl_id
        self.nsl_secret = nsl_secret
        self.token = None
        self.expires_at = 0

    def get_token(self):
        # Refresh 5 minutes before expiry
        if time.time() > self.expires_at - 300:
            self.token = get_auth_token(self.nsl_id, self.nsl_secret)
            self.expires_at = time.time() + 3600
        return self.token

Rate Limits & Performance

• Tokens are valid for 60 minutes.
• The tile service median latency is ~200 ms.
• For bulk downloads, use the coverage endpoint to precompute the tile list, then parallelize fetches.
• Consider using connection pooling (requests.Session() in Python) for repeated requests.