data.gov.il CKAN API
Official gateway to all Israeli government open data — vehicles, education, health, transport and more.
About this API
data.gov.il is Israel's official open-data portal, powered by CKAN — a free open-source platform originally built by the UK government. The API lets any developer pull hundreds of Israeli datasets in real time, with no signup and no key, at reasonable rate limits. It is arguably the single most important API for anyone building products around Israeli data.
Who it's for
Startups building vehicle, real-estate or transport products
Data journalists and researchers
Civic-tech developers
Students and capstone projects
How to use it
- 1Browse data.gov.il and find the dataset you need (e.g. "Vehicle Registration").
- 2Copy the resource_id from the dataset's API tab.
- 3GET /api/3/action/datastore_search with the resource_id.
- 4Parse the records field from the JSON — that's the actual data.
- 5Cache results daily — it avoids rate limiting and speeds up your product.
Installation & setup
No installation or key required. Plain curl / fetch works. In Node use undici or axios; in Python use requests. Wrap calls in a 24-hour cache layer (Redis/Memcached/local JSON) — datasets refresh at most daily.
Code examples
curl "https://data.gov.il/api/3/action/datastore_search?resource_id=053cea08-09bc-40ec-8f7a-156f0677aff3&limit=5"Sample response
{
"help": "https://data.gov.il/api/3/action/help_show?name=datastore_search",
"success": true,
"result": {
"resource_id": "053cea08-09bc-40ec-8f7a-156f0677aff3",
"fields": [
{
"id": "mispar_rechev",
"type": "int"
},
{
"id": "tozeret_nm",
"type": "text"
},
{
"id": "kinuy_mishari",
"type": "text"
}
],
"records": [
{
"mispar_rechev": 1234567,
"tozeret_nm": "טויוטה",
"kinuy_mishari": "קורולה הייבריד"
}
],
"total": 5870000
}
}FAQ
No. All calls are open and free. There is a soft rate limit, so cache aggressively.
Tips & pitfalls
Don't call the API from the client directly — it couples your product to upstream changes. Go through your backend and cache.
When using a new field, guard against it disappearing in a refresh.
The vehicle-registration resource (053cea08-...) is the largest and most-used — consider building a dedicated lookup around it.