compute
POST /v1/compute/servers/{serverId}/rebuild
Reinstall a server's operating system.
Authentication
Send an API key as a bearer token. The key must carry the sites.view permission; a key without it is refused with 403, not 404.
This endpoint takes no organisation id. Your key already identifies the organisation it belongs to, and the response is scoped to it.
Try it
Replace anything in angle brackets with your own values, and the key placeholder with a key from your dashboard.
curl -X POST https://api.zinndigital.com/v1/compute/servers/{serverId}/rebuild \
-H "Authorization: Bearer zdk_live_…" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "operating_system": <string>, "confirm": <string> }'Signed in? The API console in your dashboard fills in your real organisation id and your own key, and runs the request against the live API so you can see the actual response. Open this endpoint in the API console
Details
⛔⛔ **Destructive: everything on the disk is erased and cannot be recovered.** The machine comes back on a fresh image, so the answer carries `power_state: rebooting` and a client polls from there. Three guards, and none of them is optional. The caller needs `sites.delete` rather than the key that merely spends money — `dev` may commit the organisation to a billable resource without being trusted to destroy data, so this is deliberately **not** the key `resizeComputeServer` uses. The typed confirmation is re-checked **server-side**, because a dialog a client owns is a dialog an API caller skips: `confirm` must equal the server's `name` exactly, compared case-sensitively after surrounding whitespace, and anything else is `422`. And the action is audit-logged **before** the provider is called and left in place whatever happens, because an audit row written only on success leaves no trace of an attempted wipe that errored halfway — precisely the event an investigation is looking for. ⛔ **`503` is the expected answer today, and it is honest.** No adapter currently advertises rebuild: a usable one needs the provider's own operating-system list, and an OS token we guessed would wipe a customer's machine and reinstall the wrong thing. It is a `503` rather than a `422` because it is **our** gap, and a customer told "invalid input" for a control nobody wired would retype the same thing for ever. `404` for a server that is not the caller's; `422` for an empty `operating_system` or a machine that is not `active`. Requires `sites.view` **and** `sites.delete`.
Parameters
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
serverId (path) | Uuid | Yes | The server's id, as `listComputeServers` reports it. **Ours** (UUIDv7), minted when the order row was written — never the provider's own identifier for the machine. |
Request body
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
operating_system | string | Yes | Which image to install, as the provider names it. ⛔ Never a string a screen or a customer composed — an OS token we guessed would wipe the machine and reinstall the wrong thing,… |
confirm | string | Yes | The server's `name`, typed by the customer. Compared **case-sensitively** after surrounding whitespace and nothing else, so a client that forgave more would enable the button on… |
Response
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
id | Uuid | Yes | **Ours**, and also the provisioning workflow's id and the machine's name at the provider — which is what makes the whole purchase path idempotent. |
name | string | Yes | What the customer called it. ⛔ At the provider a machine's name is its row id; confusing the two is a cross-tenant defect, so this is the customer's string and nothing else. |
deploy_target | string | Yes | Which compute range the machine belongs to. |
plan_code | string | Yes | The tier it was bought on, or `""` when it was ordered by size alone. |
provider | string | Yes | Our provider id. |
spec | string | Yes | The machine size it currently runs. |
zone | string | Yes | The data centre it runs in. |
status | string<pending, provisioning, active, failed, suspended, terminated> | Yes | How far the order got — **ours**, and a different fact from `power_state`. `pending` is a row with nothing bought and nothing charged; `failed` is the state whose `message` is t… |
message | string | Yes | Why the order failed, in a sentence the customer reads. Blank unless `failed`. |
vendor_status | string | Yes | The provider's own word, verbatim and unrounded. Staff-facing detail; a customer client renders `status` and never this. |
power_state | string<unknown, on, off, starting, stopping, rebooting> | Yes | What the machine is doing right now. ⛔ **Six values, not two, and the four extra ones are the point: a machine mid-transition is not "on".** `unknown` is the honest answer when… |
addresses | string[] | Yes | Public addresses **if the provider states them**. Empty means *not stated*, never "none" — a machine rendered as having no address reads as broken. |
optimisation | string | Yes | The stack optimisation profile it was built with, or `""` for none. |
term_months | integer | Yes | The term it was bought on, or null when the provider states none. |
renews_at | string | Yes | ⛔ **Always null today, and honestly so**: the provider publishes no renewal date, and one computed from the order plus the term would be our arithmetic rendered as the provider'… |
created_at | string | Yes | When the row was created, or `""` when not stated. |
operable | boolean | Yes | Whether the customer may act on this machine — power, resize, renew, rebuild. ⛔ Read rather than re-derived from `status`: the engine refuses every one of those on anything but… |
image | string | Yes | The provider image the machine was built from. Blank on the resold range, which installs one managed image and offers no choice. |
suspended | boolean | Yes | ⛔⛔ **Whether WE stopped it, which is not the same fact as `power_state`.** A stopped machine is the customer's own choice and they may start it again; a suspended one is ours an… |
suspension_reason | string | Yes | Why, verbatim, so the customer reads the same sentence support wrote. Blank when the machine is in good standing. |
capabilities | string[] | Yes | ⭐⭐ **What this machine's provider can actually do** — capability tokens such as `compute:snapshots`, `compute:console`, `compute:firewall`, `compute:backups_manage` and `compute… |
Errors this endpoint can return
401 · 403 · 404 · 422 · 429 · 503