# Create a collection

Serverless indexes do not support collections.

```shell curl theme={null}
PINECONE_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY"

curl -s "https://api.pinecone.io/collections" \
  -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Api-Key: $PINECONE_API_KEY" \
  -H "X-Pinecone-Api-Version: 2026-04" \
  -d '{
        "name": "example-collection",
        "source": "docs-example"
  }'
```

```json curl theme={null}
{
    "name": "example-collection",
    "status": "Initializing",
    "environment": "us-east-1-aws",
    "dimension": 1536
}
```

`POST /collections`

:::code-group
```bash title="cURL"
curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.pinecone.io/collections \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer <token>' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
  "name": "<string>",
  "source": "example-source-index"
}'
```

```json title="201"
{
  "name": "example-collection",
  "size": 10000000,
  "status": "Initializing",
  "dimension": 1536,
  "vector_count": 120000,
  "environment": "us-east1-gcp"
}
```
:::

## Authorizations

- `Authorization` (header, string, required) — Bearer authentication header of the form `Bearer <token>`.

## Headers

- `X-Pinecone-Api-Version` (header, string, required) — Required date-based version header

## Body

- `name` (body, string, required) — The name of the collection to be created. Resource name must be 1-45 characters long, start and end with an alphanumeric character, and consist only of lower case alphanumeric characters or '-'.
- `source` (body, string, required) — The name of the index to be used as the source for the collection.

## Response

- `201` — The collection has been successfully created.
- `400` — Bad request. The request body included invalid request parameters.
- `401` — Unauthorized. Possible causes: Invalid API key.
- `402` — Payment required. Organization is on a paid plan and is delinquent on payment.
- `403` — You've exceed your collections quota.
- `409` — Collection of given name already exists.
- `422` — Unprocessable entity. The request body could not be deserialized.
- `500` — Internal server error.

## Related pages

- [Create a backup of an index](./database-2026-07-control-plane-create-backup.md)
- [List backups for all indexes in a project](./database-2026-07-control-plane-list-project-backups.md)
- [List backups for an index](./database-2026-07-control-plane-list-index-backups.md)
- [Describe a backup](./database-2026-07-control-plane-describe-backup.md)
- [Delete a backup](./database-2026-07-control-plane-delete-backup.md)
- [Create an index from a backup](./database-2026-07-control-plane-create-index-from-backup.md)
- [List restore jobs](./database-2026-07-control-plane-list-restore-jobs.md)
- [Describe a restore job](./database-2026-07-control-plane-describe-restore-job.md)
- [List collections](./database-2026-07-control-plane-list-collections.md)
- [Create a collection](./database-2026-07-control-plane-create-collection.md)

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