Post a NIFI template via REST?

The provided documentation is somewhat confusing, and the solution I worked out was derived from the nifi api deploy groovy script at https://github.com/aperepel/nifi-api-deploy

Ultimately, to POST a template directly, you can use the following in Python requests

requests.post("%s/nifi-api/controller/templates"%(url,), files={"template":open(filename, 'rb')})

Where filename is the filename of your template and url is the path to your nifi instance. I haven't figured it out in curl directly but this should hopefully get folks with a similar question started!

Edit: Note that you also can't upload a template with the same name as an existing template. Make sure to delete your existing template before attempting to re-upload. Using the untangle library to parse the XML of the template, the following script works just fine:

import untangle, sys, requests

def deploy_template(filename, url):
    p = untangle.parse(filename)
    new_template_name=p.template.name.cdata
    r=requests.get("%s/nifi-api/controller/templates"%(url,), headers={"Accept":"application/json"})

    for each in r.json()["templates"]:
        if each["name"]==new_template_name:
            requests.delete(each["uri"])
    requests.post("%s/nifi-api/controller/templates"%(url,), files={"template":open(filename, 'rb')})

if __name__=="__main__":
    deploy_template(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2])

The API has moved in 1.0 to:

POST /process-groups/{id}/templates/upload

Example, using Python's requests library:

res = requests.post( "{hostname}/nifi-api/process-groups/{destination_process_group}/templates/upload".format( **args ), 
    files={"template": open( file_path, 'rb')} )

If you want to POST a template to NiFi via cURL you can use the following command:

curl -iv -F template=@my_nifi_template.xml -X POST  http://nifi-host:nifi-port/nifi-api/controller/templates

This will add the template to the NiFi instance with the same name that the template was given when it was generated.

And the -iv is optional - It's just there for debugging purposes.