Communicating with External APIs

Lecture Goals

• Explain what an API is
• Explain the limitations of working with an external API
• Observe how to parse API documentation
• Observe how to send a GET request to an external API with / without an API key

The Restaurant Analogy

https://medium.com/vody-techblog/understanding-what-apis-are-all-about-ff2513b76a55

Downsides of External APIs

The main upside!

Examples

• TVMaze API
• Google Books API
• List of Publicly accessible APIs

Google Books API Checklist (part 1) - Creating your Project and API key

• Read the docs for Using the API
• Follow the link in the Acquiring and Using an API key section to the credentials page in the API console
• Click on the Dropdown near the top of the page (to the right of the Google Cloud logo) to create a new project. I’m calling mine Books Project.
• Click on the Create Credentials button and select API key.

Google Books API Checklist (part 2) - Adding the API you want to use

• Click the sidebar option for: Enable APIs and Services
• In the search input at the top, type: Books API and select it from the Marketplace search results
• Click the blue enable button to allow your API key to access the Books API

Google Books API Checklist (part 3) - Creating your API key

https://securityintelligence.com/articles/passwordless-authentication-risks-benefits/

• Navigate to the Credentials page for your project and click on your API key
• Click the clipboard button to copy the API key.
• add the API key to a local file in your project. (const API_KEY="paste_your_key_here")
• Make sure to tell git to ignore this file!

.gitignore

• add a file in the root of your project called .gitignore (this should be inside of the 07_ folder)
• this file will contain a list of files & folders for which git will not track changes
• in our case, add src/keys.js on its own line within this file.
• ✅⁇: check your version control tab within VSCode and make sure you don’t see your keys.js file there. If you do, then check for a mismatch between what you have in your .gitignore and the name/path to the keys.js file.
• ✅ When keys.js doesn’t appear in the list of files with untracked changes, you’ve done this step correctly.

Using the API

View docs for more details.

fetch(`https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=${encodeURI(query)}&key=${API_KEY}`)
  .then(res =>res.json())
  .then(console.log);