Anki Connect Plus (ACP)

Fork of Anki-Connect with additional features to facilitate syncing with other projects like our Flashcard Maker for Anki (FMA). Everything that can be done in Anki Connect can also be done with Anki Connect Plus, keeping compatibility with other addons relying on it.

Find a full list of all modifications in the changelog

Anki Connect Plus is compatible with the latest Anki stable release since 23.10.1; older versions (2.1.45 or older are no longer supported.

Documentation

See the list of supported actions

Installation

Until the add-on is officially deployed, Anki requires a manual installation.
Follow these steps to add ACP to Anki:

1. Zip the plugin contents

   • Go inside the plugin folder.
   • Select all the files and folders inside it.
   • Create a .zip archive from these items.
     ⚠️ Important: Do not zip the plugin folder itself — only its contents.

2. Rename the archive
   Change the file name and extension to: AnkiConnectPlus.ankiaddon

3. Install the add-on in Anki

• Open Anki.
• Go to Tools > Add-ons. (ctrl + shift + A for windows)
• Click Install from file... and select/drag the AnkiConnectPlus.ankiaddon file.

4. Restart Anki
   Close and reopen Anki to activate the add-on.

Anki must be kept running in the background in order for other applications to be able to use Anki Connect Plus. You can verify that Anki Connect Plus is running at any time by accessing localhost:8765 in your browser. If the server is running, you will see the message Anki Connect Plus displayed in your browser window.

Notes for Windows Users

Windows users may see a firewall nag dialog box appear on Anki startup. This occurs because Anki Connect Plus runs a local HTTP server in order to enable other applications to connect to it. The host application, Anki, must be unblocked for this plugin to function correctly.

Notes for MacOS Users

Starting with Mac OS X Mavericks, a feature named App Nap has been introduced to the operating system. This feature causes certain applications which are open (but not visible) to be placed in a suspended state. As this behavior causes Anki Connect Plus to stop working while you have another window in the foreground, App Nap should be disabled for Anki:

1. Start the Terminal application.
2. Execute the following commands in the terminal window:

   defaults write net.ankiweb.dtop NSAppSleepDisabled -bool true
   defaults write net.ichi2.anki NSAppSleepDisabled -bool true
   defaults write org.qt-project.Qt.QtWebEngineCore NSAppSleepDisabled -bool true
   

3. Restart Anki.

Application Interface for Developers

Anki Connect Plus exposes internal Anki features to external applications via an easy to use API. After being installed, this plugin will start an HTTP server on port 8765 whenever Anki is launched. Other applications (including browser extensions) can then communicate with it via HTTP requests.

By default, Anki Connect Plus will only bind the HTTP server to the 127.0.0.1 IP address, so that you will only be able to access it from the same host on which it is running. If you need to access it over a network, you can change the binding address in the configuration. Go to Tools->Add-ons->Anki Connect Plus->Config and change the "webBindAddress" value. For example, you can set it to 0.0.0.0 in order to bind it to all network interfaces on your host. This also requires a restart for Anki.

Sample Invocation

Every request consists of a JSON-encoded object containing an action, a version, contextual params, and a key value used for authentication (which is optional and can be omitted by default). Anki Connect Plus will respond with an object containing two fields: result and error. The result field contains the return value of the executed API, and the error field is a description of any exception thrown during API execution (the value null is used if execution completed successfully).

Sample successful response:

{"result": ["Default", "Filtered Deck 1"], "error": null}

Samples of failed responses:

{"result": null, "error": "unsupported action"}

{"result": null, "error": "guiBrowse() got an unexpected keyword argument 'foobar'"}

For compatibility with clients designed to work with older versions of Anki Connect Plus, failing to provide a version field in the request will make the version default to 4. Furthermore, when the provided version is level 4 or below, the API response will only contain the value of the result; no error field is available for error handling.

You can use whatever language or tool you like to issue request to Anki Connect Plus, but a couple of simple examples are included below as reference.

Curl

curl localhost:8765 -X POST -d '{"action": "deckNames", "version": 6}'

Powershell

(Invoke-RestMethod -Uri http://localhost:8765 -Method Post -Body '{"action": "deckNames", "version": 6}').result

Python

import json
import urllib.request

def request(action, **params):
    return {'action': action, 'params': params, 'version': 6}

def invoke(action, **params):
    requestJson = json.dumps(request(action, **params)).encode('utf-8')
    response = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(urllib.request.Request('http://127.0.0.1:8765', requestJson)))
    if len(response) != 2:
        raise Exception('response has an unexpected number of fields')
    if 'error' not in response:
        raise Exception('response is missing required error field')
    if 'result' not in response:
        raise Exception('response is missing required result field')
    if response['error'] is not None:
        raise Exception(response['error'])
    return response['result']

invoke('createDeck', deck='test1')
result = invoke('deckNames')
print('got list of decks: {}'.format(result))

JavaScript

function invoke(action, version, params={}) {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        const xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
        xhr.addEventListener('error', () => reject('failed to issue request'));
        xhr.addEventListener('load', () => {
            try {
                const response = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText);
                if (Object.getOwnPropertyNames(response).length != 2) {
                    throw 'response has an unexpected number of fields';
                }
                if (!response.hasOwnProperty('error')) {
                    throw 'response is missing required error field';
                }
                if (!response.hasOwnProperty('result')) {
                    throw 'response is missing required result field';
                }
                if (response.error) {
                    throw response.error;
                }
                resolve(response.result);
            } catch (e) {
                reject(e);
            }
        });

        xhr.open('POST', 'http://127.0.0.1:8765');
        xhr.send(JSON.stringify({action, version, params}));
    });
}

await invoke('createDeck', 6, {deck: 'test1'});
const result = await invoke('deckNames', 6);
console.log(`got list of decks: ${result}`);

Authentication

Anki Connect Plus supports requiring authentication in order to make API requests. This support is disabled by default, but can be enabled by setting the apiKey field of Anki-Config's settings (Tools->Add-ons->Anki Connect Plus->Config) to a desired string. If you have done so, you should see the requestPermission API request return true for requireApiKey. You then must include an additional parameter called key in any further API request bodies, whose value must match the configured API key.