---
home: true
heroText:
tagline:
# Bringing JavaScript to the Polkadot world.
# actionText: Repository Overview
# actionLink: /REPOS.md
features:
- title: API
  details: A powerful dynamic API that allows chain interactions with transparent encoding and decoding.
- title: Substrate defaults
  details: An overview of the various default methods, state entries and RPCs for Substrate-based chains.
- title: Types
  details: Various type interfaces to make using returned values from API calls transparent in your code.

footer: Apache-2 Licensed | Copyright © 2017-2020 polkadot-js authors and contributors
---

## Welcome

The API provides application developers the ability to query a node and interact with the Polkadot or Substrate chains using Javascript. Here you will find documentation and examples to get you started.

::: tip Getting started & Examples
[Jump right in](/start/) and get an overview on using the API in your projects, from installation all the way through to making it do magic. Have things working and want tips? The [cookbook](/cookbook/) provides some tips and tricks. Getting started and want some full examples? [The ApiPromise examples](/examples/promise/) provide some basic examples.
:::

## The Polkadot Project

You can read more about the Polkadot Network at [https://polkadot.network/](https://polkadot.network/) and more about the polkadot-js projects at [https://polkadot.js.org](https://polkadot.js.org)

## Github repositories

You can find the Polkadot repositories at:

- [https://github.com/polkadot-js](https://github.com/polkadot-js)
- [https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot)
- [https://github.com/paritytech/substrate](https://github.com/paritytech/substrate)

This documentation is generated from [https://github.com/polkadot-js/api](https://github.com/polkadot-js/api)

## Contributing

Contribution to the Polkadot JS API are more than welcome. You can [report issues](https://github.com/polkadot-js/api/issues/new) and [log feature requests](https://github.com/polkadot-js/api/issues/new).