nxapi

JavaScript library, command line tool and Electron app for accessing the Nintendo Switch Online and Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app APIs. Show your Nintendo Switch presence on Discord, get friend notifications on desktop, and download and access SplatNet 2, NookLink, SplatNet 3 and Parental Controls data.

Features

• Command line and Electron app interfaces
• Interactive Nintendo Account login for the Nintendo Switch Online and Nintendo Switch Parental Controls apps
• Automated login to the Nintendo Switch Online app API
  • This uses nxapi-znca-api.fancy.org.uk API by default.
  • Alternatively a custom server can be used.
• Get Nintendo Switch account information, friends list and game-specific services
• Show Discord Rich Presence using your Nintendo Switch presence
  • Fetch presence using a secondary account or from a custom URL.
  • Show your account's friend code (or a custom friend code).
  • All titles are supported, and since August 2025 all titles can show their full name next to your name in Discord without any extra configuration.
  • Additional presence information for Splatoon 3
• Show notifications for friend Nintendo Switch presences
• [Electron app] Open game-specific services
  • Including NookLink, which doesn't work in web browsers as it requires custom JavaScript APIs.
• Nintendo Switch Online app API proxy server and presence server
  • This allows a single account to fetch presence for multiple users.
  • Data will be cached for a short time to reduce the number of requests to Nintendo's server.
  • This automatically handles authentication when given a Nintendo Account session token. This makes it much easier to access the API from a browser, in scripts or in other software.
• Download all personal SplatNet 2 and SplatNet 3 data, including battle and Salmon Run results
• Download island newspapers from and send messages and reactions using NookLink
• Download all Nintendo Switch Parental Controls usage records

The API library and types are exported for use in JavaScript/TypeScript software. The app/commands properly cache access tokens and try to handle requests to appear as Nintendo's apps - if using nxapi as a library you will need to handle this yourself. More information.

Discord presence | Additional data for Splatoon 3 | Friend notifications ------------------------------------|-----------------------------------|----------------------------------- | <img src="resources/discord-activity-splatoon3.png" alt="Screenshot showing Splatoon 3 as a Discord activity with SplatNet 3 presence information" width="308"> |

Electron app

nxapi includes an Electron app, which can be downloaded here. The app can be used to:

• Login to a Nintendo Account, both for the Nintendo Switch Online app and Parental Controls app
  • This will open the Nintendo Account login page in the app, just like signing into Nintendo's own apps.
  • The Nintendo Account authorisation page can be opened in a browser by holding <kbd>Shift</kbd> while pressing add account.
  • Accounts are shared with the nxapi command line interface.
• Share Nintendo Switch presence to Discord
  • Using a custom presence URL or a friend's presence is supported.
  • Using the authenticated user's presence is not supported, as this is no longer available from the API (#1).
• Showing notifications for friend presences
  • Multiple users can be selected.
• Access game-specific services
  • These will be opened in the app.

The app includes the nxapi command line at dist/bundle/cli-bundle.js.

# macOS
Nintendo\ Switch\ Online.app/Contents/bin/nxapi

# Linux, installed via dpkg
# This is linked as /usr/bin/nxapi
/opt/Nintendo\ Switch\ Online/bin/nxapi

On Windows, Node.js must be installed separately.

# PowerShell
node $env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\nxapi-app\resources\app\dist\bundle\cli-bundle.js ...

# Command Prompt
node %localappdata%\Programs\nxapi-app\resources\app\dist\bundle\cli-bundle.js ...

Do I need a Nintendo Switch Online membership?

No.

The only requirement to use this is that your Nintendo Account is linked to a Network Service Account, i.e. you've linked your Nintendo Account to a Nintendo Switch console at some point. It doesn't matter if your account is no longer linked to any console.

You will need to have an online membership (free trial is ok) to use any game-specific services if you want to access those. SplatNet 2 can be used without an active membership, but NookLink and Smash World both require an active membership just to open them.

For Parental Controls data, you don't need to have linked your account to a console. You will need to use Nintendo's app to add a console to your account though, as this isn't supported in nxapi and the Parental Controls API is a bit useless without doing this.

The Electron app does not connect to Discord on Linux

The Electron app, Discord, or both, may be sandboxed depending on how they're installed.

The dpkg and AppImage nxapi packages are not sandboxed. The official dpkg Discord package and tar release are not sandboxed.

The snap packages of nxapi and Discord are sandboxed and cannot support Discord Rich Presence.

The Flatpak Discord package is sandboxed, but can be used by linking the IPC socket outside of the app directory: https://github.com/flathub/com.discordapp.Discord/wiki/Rich-Precense-(discord-rpc).

Will my Nintendo Switch console be banned for using this?

No.

Will my Nintendo Account/Network Service Account be banned for using this?

It's extremely unlikely:

• Other projects (e.g. splatnet2statink, splatoon2.ink) have used the same reverse engineered APIs for a long time (pretty much since they've existed) and no one has ever been banned for using them. splatnet2statink in monitoring mode updates every 5 minutes by default - monitoring commands (Discord presence, friend notifications and SplatNet 2/SplatNet 3 monitoring) in nxapi only update slightly more frequently (every 1 minute), so there's not much higher risk than using splatnet2statink.
• Unlike console bans, account bans would prevent you from accessing digital content or online services you've paid for. (If your console was banned you'd still be able to use it and you could just buy another one to access your account.)
• Nintendo can't stop you watching their app's network activity, which is all the reverse engineering required to develop this.

A secondary account is required for Discord Rich Presence; you don't need to sign in to your main account.

[!CAUTION]

Update 08/09/2023

Nintendo has banned a small number of users from accessing SplatNet 3. Nintendo has not sent any notification to affected users. This is only known to have affected users of one application unrelated to nxapi.

SplatNet 3 returns 401 Unauthorized (ERROR_INVALID_GAME_WEB_TOKEN... which causes the official app to retry repeatedly); there is no specific error message for banned users. No other Nintendo services are affected.

If you only use nxapi for Discord Rich Presence, your main account is safe, because nxapi does not use it to fetch presence data. nxapi requires a secondary account to fetch your main account's presence data, so even if that account was banned you could just create another one without losing anything.

More information:

• https://tkgstrator.work/article/2023/09/announcement.html
• https://github.com/frozenpandaman/s3s/issues/146

Why is data sent to non-Nintendo servers?

It's required to generate some data to make Nintendo think you're using the real Nintendo Switch Online app, as currently it's too hard to do this locally. (This isn't required for Parental Controls data.) See the Coral client authentication section below for more information.

I need help using nxapi or Nintendo's APIs/I want to share something I've made using nxapi or Nintendo's APIs

I've created a Discord server for this project. Anyone interested in Nintendo's smart device app APIs is welcome to join, even if you're not interested in this project.

If you are creating something using Nintendo's smart device APIs: updates to Nintendo's apps are published in #nintendo-app-versions.

Invitation: https://discord.com/invite/4D82rFkXRv

Install

Install with npm

Node.js and npm must already be installed.

# From registry.npmjs.com
npm install --global nxapi

# From gitlab.fancy.org.uk
npm install --global --registry https://gitlab.fancy.org.uk/api/v4/packages/npm/ @samuel/nxapi

# From npm.pkg.github.com
npm install --global --registry https://npm.pkg.github.com @samuelthomas2774/nxapi

# From gitlab.com
npm install --global --registry https://gitlab.com/api/v4/packages/npm/ @samuelthomas2774/nxapi

Install from source

Node.js and npm must already be installed.

[!NOTE] When building from source nxapi will not have a nxapi-auth client identifier necessary to use the f-generation API. Register a test OAuth client at https://nxapi-auth.fancy.org.uk/oauth/clients with the scope ca:gf ca:er ca:dr and add the client ID to the .env file used by nxapi