# Octopus Developer Guide

> Octopus Community is a white-label community layer that apps embed to add social feeds, posts, comments and groups. It ships as native SDKs (Android, iOS, Flutter, React Native, Unity), a web integration, and a server-side REST API. This documentation covers SDK setup, linking your own authenticated users through SSO, UI theming, push notifications, analytics events, groups, bridges, and the server-to-server Connect API.

Every page below is linked as Markdown. Any documentation URL also serves Markdown by appending `.md` to it (for example `/SDK/sso/` is also available as `/SDK/sso.md`).

Most pages document all platforms side by side. In the Markdown, platform-specific sections are delimited by `<!-- tab: iOS -->` / `<!-- /tab -->` comment markers. Only apply code from the block whose marker matches the reader's platform — adjacent blocks are the same feature written for a different SDK, not a continuation.

A version badge next to a heading or a parameter gives the SDK version it relates to: `(≥ 1.12.0)` means it was introduced in 1.12.0, `(< 1.6.0)` marks a deprecated API kept for older versions.

## Start here

- [Octopus Developer Guide](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/index.md): What Octopus Community is, the two user-authentication models (Octopus-managed accounts vs. your own SSO), and the integration in 4 steps.

## Mobile & app SDKs

- [SDK Setup Guide](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/SDK/sso.md): The main integration guide, covering every platform in parallel tabs (Android, iOS, Flutter, React Native, Unity): installing and initialising the SDK; linking your authenticated user through SSO (ClientUser, app-managed fields, entitlements, guest-session detection, entitlement refresh); displaying the Octopus UI and opening a specific screen; Unified Profile; explicit terms acceptance; theming, icon and TopAppBar customisation; push notifications and not-seen counts; analytics and Octopus events; groups and batch follow-state sync; locked-group gating; bridges and Bridge Share image signing; Octopus A/B testing.
- [Content Options](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/SDK/content-options.md): Which content-creation options the SDK exposes to users, what the default behaviour is, and how it differs per platform.
- [Profile Field Lock](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/SDK/profile-lock.md): Pinning nickname, avatar and bio to values your app owns: lock states, per-field behaviour, what the Edit Profile screen shows, how it interacts with the SSO appManagedFields, and how to configure it.
- [Editor Mock Mode (Unity)](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/SDK/sso/unity-editor-mock-mode.md): Running the Octopus Unity SDK against a built-in mock backend inside the Unity Editor — no device build needed — driving callbacks manually and writing EditMode tests against recorded calls.
- [Web Community](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/Web.md): Embedding the Octopus community in a web page: integration steps and theme integration.

## Server-side

- [Authentication (JWT)](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/backend/jwt/generate_jwt.md): The signed JWTs your backend issues, with Node.js, Python and Java examples: SSO auth tokens for user linking, bridge "Post" tokens, and bridge "Share" tokens carrying an image.
- [SSO Auth (JWT)](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/backend/sso.md): The JWT claim format Octopus expects for SSO, and how to generate a signed SSO token.
- [Generate a bridge token](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/backend/bridges/generate_token.md): The JWT claim format for bridge tokens and how to sign and generate one server-side.
- [Connect API (REST)](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/connect.md): The server-to-server REST API: versioning, authentication, request and response conventions, the endpoint reference, tooling (OpenAPI/Postman collection), worked example use cases, rate limiting and changelog.

## Optional

- [Getting Started](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/getting_started.md): A short three-step quickstart (get an API key, install the SDK, display the UI). Not linked from the sidebar and largely superseded by the SDK Setup Guide — prefer that page.
- [20 Minutes sample](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/integration-example.md): Screenshots of a real in-app Octopus integration. Almost entirely images, so there is little text to read.
- [User management](https://doc.octopuscommunity.com/user-management.md): A feature-comparison table between authentication modes. The table is rendered by a React component, so its rows are not present in the Markdown version — read the HTML page instead.