Terra API Streaming Best Practices

Guidelines for building on the Terra API Streaming (Real-Time) API, which delivers live, roughly per-second metrics from wearables. This skill carries the architecture and the protocol gotchas inline; platform setup and the full consumer protocol live in references/.

Start from an example app

For a new app, start from the published example and adapt it to the user's requirements: streaming-mobile-app for a React Native producer, streaming-consumer-web-app for a web consumer. Run terra version and, if the CLI is missing, offer to install it (see below). Then list the current catalog and clone the closest fit:

terra examples list --select name,title,description
terra examples clone streaming-mobile-app my-app

Neither needs a login. Read the downloaded README and AGENTS.md and follow next_steps to install dependencies, configure and run it before building on it. Cloning only downloads files. For an existing app, use the example as a reference and adapt the relevant pieces in place. In a chat assistant, which cannot run the CLI, give the user these commands to run in their own terminal, or link the source at https://github.com/tryterra/terra-examples/tree/main/examples/streaming-mobile-app.

Account tools: CLI or MCP

The streaming websocket surface has no account commands, and neither the CLI nor the MCP mints the producer or consumer token a socket authenticates with: your backend mints those, per session, through the flow this skill describes. What the account tools cover is the layer under that: the long-lived credential your backend holds, and whether the user being streamed for exists at all.