What is an API contract

Your catalog is what you have. A contract is what you promise. Elva’s API contracts let you carve a curated, versioned, governed slice out of your API surface — cherry-picked from your collections, trimmed to exactly the fields you want to expose, published to every surface your consumers live on, and monitored for drift against the code that backs it.

The problem contracts solve

The same API serves wildly different audiences, and serving them all from one raw spec fails everyone at once. A partner needs strict versioning and a stable subset; handing them your full internal spec overexposes fields you never meant to share. An internal team needs speed, not ceremony. A public developer needs polish and full documentation. An AI agent needs rich schemas and tool stability — and absolutely should not see your admin endpoints.

A contract is the missing layer between your catalog and your consumers: one promise per audience, each with its own surface, its own governance, and its own artifacts.

Example: a small partner order API

Create a Partner Integration contract called Partner Orders. Select GET /orders and GET /orders/{orderId} from your order collection. Keep the fields partners need, review PII and internal-field flags, and describe the identifiers, pagination, and error responses.

Choose the destinations partners will use, configure authentication for any MCP server, and review approval and public-sharing settings. Save a draft, obtain the required review, then publish and test as a partner consumer. Future collection changes appear for review; they do not silently redefine this published contract.