Intercom hello world

Intercom Hello World

Overview

Minimal working examples covering the Intercom core data model: contacts (users and leads), conversations, messages, and tags. This skill gives you the first end-to-end round trip against the Intercom REST API — create a contact, search it, message it, open a conversation, and tag it — so you can confirm your credentials work and internalize how the entities relate before building anything real.

Prerequisites

Before running any snippet below, make sure the following are in place. Each is verified once during the intercom-install-auth setup step:

• Completed the intercom-install-auth setup (installs the SDK and stores your token).
• The intercom-client npm package installed in your project (npm install intercom-client).
• A valid Intercom access token exported as INTERCOM_ACCESS_TOKEN in your environment. The SDK reads this token to authenticate every request; there is no separate login call.

Instructions

The workflow is five short steps against the core data model. The first — creating a contact — is shown in full here so you can run immediately. Steps 2 through 5 (search, message, conversation, tag) follow the identical client.<resource>.<verb>(...) shape and live in the walkthrough reference.

Step 1: Create a Contact

Contacts are the core entity. They have a role of either user (identified) or lead (anonymous).

import { IntercomClient } from "intercom-client";

const client = new IntercomClient({
  token: process.env.INTERCOM_ACCESS_TOKEN!,
});

// Create a user contact
const user = await client.contacts.create({
  role: "user",
  externalId: "user-12345",
  email: "[email protected]",
  name: "Jane Smith",
});

console.log(`Created contact: ${user.id} (${user.role})`);

Remaining steps

Continue in the full walkthrough, which covers, with complete code and response shapes:

• Step 2 — Search for Contacts (client.contacts.search)
• Step 3 — Send a Message (client.messages.create, admin → contact)
• Step 4 — Create a Conversation (client.conversations.create)
• Step 5 — Tag a Contact (client.tags.create + client.contacts.tag)

The walkthrough also carries the full Core Data Model reference table (Contact, Conversation, Message, Tag, Company, Admin and their key fields).

Output

Running the snippets produces:

• A created contact object — id, role, email, external_id, custom_attributes, and timestamps (see the full response shape in the walkthrough).
• Console log lines confirming each operation, e.g. Created contact: 6657add46abd0167d9419c3a (user).
• When you run the end-to-end script, a short report of your authenticated admin name plus workspace contact and conversation counts.

Nothing is written to disk — every result is an in-memory API object plus the console.log lines above. A successful run means every call returned without throwing.

Error Handling

Error	Cause	Solution
not_found (404)	Contact/conversation ID invalid	Verify the ID exists
parameter_invalid	Missing required field	Check required params in docs
conflict (409)	Duplicate external_id	Use unique identifiers
unauthorized (401)	Invalid token	Regenerate access token (re-run intercom-install-auth)

Examples

• Full five-step walkthrough — create, search, message, converse, and tag, each with complete code and response shapes: references/walkthrough.md.
• Complete working script — one runnable file that verifies the connection, creates a contact, and lists workspace contacts and conversations, with the expected console output: references/complete-script.md.

Both are copy-paste runnable once the Prerequisites above are met.

Resources

• Contacts API
• Conversations API
• Messages API
• intercom-node GitHub

Next Steps

Proceed to the intercom-local-dev-loop skill to set up a fast local development workflow (watch mode, sandbox workspace, and safe test data) once this hello-world round trip succeeds.