Inside the Miscellanous category create a course named "Test course: S" Enable "Mobile services" Plugins / Web Services / Services Create a new service in the same page, include in that service the function: core_files_get_files Create a Token for any user that can view the courses in that category and for the service you created before: Click on Site administration ► Plugins ► Web services ► Manage tokens Click add, select user and service Next, you can do a CURL REST call simulating a WS client request: You need to change: The URL pointing to your Moodle site The wstoken value: The one you created The contextid: Verify that the Miscellaneous category context id is 3   curl 'http://localhost/m/stable_27/webservice/rest/server.php?moodlewsrestformat=json' -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Origin: file://' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: es,en;q=0.8,de-DE;q=0.6,de;q=0.4' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1798.0 Safari/537.36' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8' -H 'Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --data 'contextid=3&component=&filearea=&itemid=0&filepath=&filename=Miscellaneous&wsfunction=core_files_get_files&wstoken=a94d048ece53cd8284c35af81eebee72' --compressed You should receive a JSON string containing a list of parent directories and also a list including the courses in that category