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You can use Manus’s documented v2 task API as the source for an archive bridge only when you’re authorized to access the relevant Manus account and task. The documentation describes task management and task-message retrieval; it does not establish a supported way to read arbitrary conversations from another account or another AI provider. Make authorization and narrow task selection the first design requirements—not assumptions the bridge works around.
1. Authorize the source and restrict the task scope
Before connecting a vault, establish whose Manus account the bridge will access, who authorized that access, and which task or tasks may be archived. Manus’s API is organized around tasks and their histories. The documented task interface is not evidence of permission to retrieve conversations from unrelated accounts or other providers.
Make selection explicit
- Require the user to authorize the Manus connection and select the intended task scope. Do not default to reading every task.
- Check the selected account context and task against an allowlist before fetching or saving messages. Treat this allowlist as a bridge-side safeguard, not a Manus API guarantee.
- Store provenance with each archived record: provider, authorized account context, task ID, message or event ID, and available source time. This lets a person trace an archived item back to its origin.
The Manus API introduction identifies v2 as the latest API and says v1 is deprecated and will be removed. Base a new bridge on the documented v2 REST API rather than building around v1 behavior.
2. Protect the credential as a high-value secret
Manus documents two relevant authentication approaches: an x-manus-api-key for direct integrations and an OAuth bearer token for third-party applications acting on a user’s behalf. The Manus API Authentication documentation warns: “Each key provides full access to your Manus account.” That makes a broadly privileged account key a serious exposure if the bridge or its deployment environment is compromised.
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Choose credentials for the integration
- For a personal, direct integration, keep the API key in a secret manager or protected environment variable. Never put it in source code, repository history, browser-side bundles, application logs, or archived conversation content.
- For a multi-user application, use the appropriate user-authorized OAuth flow and follow the scopes required by the endpoints the application calls. Do not ask users to hand a shared service your personal account key.
- Restrict access to the secret to the bridge component that needs it. Document how to revoke or rotate it, and revoke it immediately if you suspect it has been exposed, as the authentication guidance advises.
3. Preserve message identity and archive only what you need
The documented task.listMessages endpoint returns user and assistant messages as well as other events. A faithful archive should retain enough structure to distinguish a conversation turn from an event and to identify its source; flattening everything into one text transcript can erase that context.
Build a traceable record
- Keep the source role, task ID, stable message or event ID, source timestamp when present, and retrieval time.
- Retain attachment identity and metadata only for content the user chose to archive. A
file_uidorversion_uidis an identifier, not a downloadable URL; use documented attachment resolution instead of treating it as a link. - Use stable source IDs to deduplicate retries where available. Preserve unknown event types for review or quarantine rather than silently converting them into ordinary messages.
- Keep the archive’s records private by default. Avoid generating public or shareable links for sensitive conversation content.
Use structured output only for derived records
Manus Structured Output can produce schema-shaped results after a task completes and return them through API events or a webhook. That can be useful for a compact index or extracted fields, but it is a derived result, not a replacement for raw history when faithful archival matters. The Structured Output documentation says the application should check success before treating value as meaningful data.
4. Treat webhooks and polling as separate ingestion choices
Manus documents webhook notifications, including structured results in webhook callbacks, and also documents task-message retrieval. Neither option should be treated as a promise of exactly-once delivery. Choose a flow based on how the bridge will detect changes and recover from interruption, then make its writes idempotent.
| Choice | What the bridge does | Recovery and safety work |
|---|---|---|
| Webhook | Receives documented notifications when relevant task events or structured results are sent. | Validate the current documented signature scheme, constrain accepted event types and payload sizes, and enqueue events before writing to the vault. Confirm the current signature header, signing-secret lifecycle, timestamp tolerance, and retry behavior in the endpoint documentation before deployment; those details are not established here. |
| Polling | Retrieves task messages through the documented API flow on a schedule or during a sync. | Checkpoint a cursor or last-processed stable message identity, handle task status and error states, and make vault writes idempotent. Confirm the selected flow’s delivery guarantees rather than assuming exactly-once processing. |
Validate before committing
For either flow, put an ingestion validator between Manus and the vault. Check the task and account against the authorized scope, verify expected event shape and identifiers, and set a maximum payload size. Reject or quarantine unrecognized or malformed data instead of guessing how it should be interpreted. Record a checkpoint only after the corresponding archive write is durable; otherwise an interrupted write can cause missing records or duplicate work.
5. Define retention, deletion, and recovery before launch
Archiving creates a second copy of sensitive material, so the vault needs its own retention period, deletion path, backup-expiry rule, and reconciliation process. Do not infer the vault’s obligations or Manus’s source-side retention behavior from a different API flow.
Know what source deletion does and does not cover
The v2 task.delete endpoint permanently deletes eligible tasks, and Manus says a running task must be stopped first. Agent-related tasks—including agent main tasks and subtasks—cannot be deleted through that endpoint. A bridge should surface these limits rather than promise that every archived source task can later be erased through the API.
A separate Manus v1 OpenAI-compatible SDK guide says uploaded files in that documented flow are automatically deleted after 48 hours and recommends deleting unneeded completed tasks. That figure applies to uploaded files in that v1 flow; it is not a general retention promise for v2 tasks, task histories, attachment objects, or the destination vault. Confirm the current source-side policy for the exact object types your integration uses.
Write down the deletion and restore path
- Set a user-visible retention period for vault records and define how deletion requests are applied to records and backups.
- Specify whether the bridge will attempt source-side task deletion, and explain the endpoint’s eligibility limits before making that choice.
- Use a reconciliation process to compare the authorized source scope with archived identities and report gaps or failed deletions.
- Test recovery from interrupted ingestion and vault outages so checkpoints, retries, and backup restoration do not silently lose or duplicate records.
A practical bridge flow
The following is a design recommendation based on the documented task, authentication, message, and deletion interfaces; it is not a Manus reference architecture.
- Authorize: have the user connect an account through the chosen authentication flow and select the task scope.
- Fetch: retrieve only the selected task history using documented v2 methods, or receive supported webhook notifications for that scope.
- Validate: check account and task allowlists, event shape, size, and source IDs; quarantine unexpected payloads.
- Normalize: preserve role, task and message identity, available source time, retrieval time, and attachment metadata.
- Commit: write idempotently to the vault and advance a checkpoint only after durable success.
- Enforce lifecycle rules: apply the chosen vault retention policy, expose source deletion limits, and account for backup expiry and reconciliation.
Before deploying webhook ingestion, verify the current v2 endpoint documentation for signature validation and replay or retry behavior. Also confirm current retention policies for the task histories and attachment objects the bridge will use; the documented deletion operations alone do not settle those policies.
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