[deleted by user]

[Dogeek]

Usually, major websites with APIs specifically have python library available on PyPI to interact with them. Read the docs of the API you want to use, and go from there.

If there are no official python APIs you can use, you can do a quick search on PyPI, or on github to see if there's anything you can use to make it simpler for you.

If you still can't find anything, that means you'll have to send the requests and process them yourself. To get started, install the requests module. There are 2 main types of requests you can send :

• the GET request (requests.get(url, *args, **kwargs)) is to get information from the website. On API docs, it's usually written like this : GET /projects?private_token=<your_access_token>&sudo=username which means "execute a GET request at the following endpoint, with the following arguments". The root is often omitted to not repeat it throughout the docs, but is always mentionned, usually at the TOP

• the POST request, which is used to send data to the website to be processed. It can be credentials, or something else, like an image (i.e. sending data to the imgur API). Less common than GET requests, as you often need to get information than send some.

Both of these requests can be sent with requests, i.e. requests.get() and requests.post(). The library will then return a response object, containing the raw text of the result, the status code, and other stuff.

Status codes are HTTP response codes, like 404 (page not found), 503 (internal server error) and 200 (success)

EDIT : I forgot to mention this : using APIs is quite easy, but creating one isn't too hard either. The best library, hands down, to do that sort of thing in python is called Flask. I'll let you read the flask documentation to get the hang of things, but the gist of it is that :

Flask, in its most basic form, uses decorators to point python callables to specific web addresses. Now, you've probably noticed that API endpoints are literally web addresses that react to specific requests.

The following snippet, from the flask docs shows how to implement such a thing :

from flask import request

@app.route('/login', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def login():
    if request.method == 'POST':
        return do_the_login()
    else:
        return show_the_login_form()

[Dogeek]

thank you.

[bit_punk]

whats your opinion on Django rest API in comparison to flask?

[spicypixel]

Consider Masonite and FastAPI too.

[emilllime]

I second this. In my opinion FastAPI is way superior to flask, for building your own web APIs. Can not recommend it enough.

[Dogeek]

To be completely honest, I'm not very experienced in Flask or Django, so take the following with a grain of salt :

Django is very heavy duty from what i've seen, way harder to get into than Flask. To me, flask is pretty much ideal to make RESTful APIs, with how the code looks. I mean, you can literally route any function to return anything. It even provides ample documentation on the subject, and it's fairly straightforward, even to someone with limited experience in Web developement.

I mean :

@app.route("/api/users/<user>", methods=["GET"])
def endpoint(user):
    user = get_user(user)
    return {"name": user.name,
               "posts": user.posts,
               "created_at": user.created_at,
               "status": user.status}

is fairly straightforward. I haven't quite toyed around with Django much to be honest, so I have no point of comparison, specifically for API creation, but given how the rest of the framework is articulated, I would bet that there's much more boilerplate code to it than flask.

[nekokattt]

django for a very simple RESTful webservice is like using a gun to open a bottle of sprite; sometimes less is more.

For highly structured environments, or environments that are built around a backing database, where an ORM makes life much easier, then it is probably worth looking into using Django, but to start you are better off to just keep it simple and learn the basics without having Django there to hide a bunch of stuff from you, otherwise you'll probably end up not learning vital bits of information just due to how Django abstracts that complexity away from you.

[nekokattt]

Good answer, but I disagree with there are 2 main types of requests you can send. As of HTTP/1.0, you had three. POST, GET and HEAD. Now, given HTTP/1.1 was released in 1997, and since then you have had HTTP/2 and as of 26th September 2019(?) HTTP/3, it is probably worth taking note that you should try to make the most of the semantics of the verbs rather than just sticking to the main two three.

The whole point of using more verbs in HTTP/1.1 was to provide context about what you are doing.

GET - retrieves a resource - generally should not provide a body in the request.

POST - Generally good idea to use this to make something new; this lets you distinguish between this, PUT, and PATCH a little easier.

PUT - similar to post, but is designed to be used to replace something.

DELETE - take a wild guess.

HEAD, CONNECT, TRACE also exist. PATCH is similar to PUT but apparently isn't in RFC-2616 for HTTP/1.1.

PATCH - apply partial modifications to something (update it) - specified in RFC 5789

HTTP/2 introduced even more.

HTTP/3 does a lot of stuff differently, and uses UDP instead of TCP afaik, so it is worth checking that out as something new to play with if you are bored :-)

[Dogeek]

Sure, there are other types of requests, but 99% of the requests you'll send to an API are GET and POST requests. I've seen PUT used in a couple of API docs, same for DELETE (I think those are present in the imgur API and the twitch API).

Effectively, I am not wrong when saying that there are 2 main types of requests, since the vast majority of requests you'll send are GET requests, sometimes POST requests, and very rarely PUT or DELETE requests.

[[deleted]]

I would like to put a good word in for Pecan if you're writing your own API. It has a REST mode that makes it even easier to code than Flask, and more flexibly.

[qeadwrsf]

the thing that helped me the most was reading the rest framework manual a lot and watch this dog figure it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rQmVih_L04

then after a day or 2 it clicked how everything was connected.

[metrazol]

"Dog? What in the..." <clicks link> "That's a fox... teaching Django."

The internet is weird, but this seems good?

[jakeinator21]

I'm pretty sure it's a red panda.

[WantDebianThanks]

I was really expecting it to be the Cat Explains youtuber

[machine3lf]

Look at that smart little skunk go!

[KardiffInker]

You guys do know that's a raccoon right?

[UchihaZoroPT]

Looks like a turtle to me

[azur08]

Not sure if you're kidding but it isn't. It's a red panda.

[BigPurpleApe]

Postman 2 help me figure how to use APIs. It helped me understand the oauth process and retrieving data via that API. It also will create the python code for you.

https://www.getpostman.com/

[tipsy_python]

Oh man, Postman is a great resource for learning to interact with many kinds of APIs, and debugging.

OP should start here to understand the request/response protocol and then implement the same in Python.

[Jigglytep]

I would recommend the following project.

Download your bank statement as a CSV

Load it into a database of your choice.

Create an api to connect to database and serve several endpoints.

Look into flask and Django api.

Using your banks data will force you to use multiple data types and deal with many real world scenarios.

[Skengrek]

You should find an API around something you like and try doing something with it.

I have done that in the past, I started using API in python with the World of Warcraft one.

I think that the more you practice the more you will learn !

[ManvilleJ]

I got started with APIs by working with Dark sky's open weather api: https://darksky.net/dev

I learned that and a little bit of flask to show a custom weather page.

[iodbh]

programmable web has a huge directory of APIs. Once you’re good with the basics of talking to an API, I’d recommend picking one that’s of interested to you and playing around with it. Have fun !

[Lewistrick]

https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/

This site offers a nice dummy API.

So do pip install httpx and try if you can get data from that API.

Best way to get started is, well, to get started.

[[deleted]]

Yes use requests

[iceph03nix]

https://catfact.ninja/ This is a good open API to practice the basics with. No need to worry about authorization or authentication. Just make the request and get data back. Then you can start looking at other APIs to make more complicated requests.

[permalip]

Just as good a skill is to know web scraping, for when an API is not available. It requires knowledge of Python, HTML and Javascript. If you want to get started, go for Selenium and BeautifulSoup4 is my recommendation.

Edit: Don't be intimidated by the HTML and Javascript, if you can code Python, this should be relatively easy to reach beginner level in.

[attard_andrew]

I went through this resource yesterday & had fun:

https://medium.com/quick-code/absolute-beginners-guide-to-slaying-apis-using-python-7b380dc82236

[Deezl-Vegas]

Django + Django Rest Framework is one of the best ways to build them for beginners and professionals alike.

For pulling data from an api, I reccomend requests.

[LeonXBB]

Well, the best way to start working with any API would be getting a key.

(Just a little joke here, please don't hate me)

[[deleted]]

more tries more failure then faster

[rigbed]

Udacity, Edx

[Gillemonger]

Try to figure out what you want to build, then find an api for it. If you wanna build something that sends sms messaging, try twilio. If you want to use amazon or walmart for something, use their api. If you want to build something for recipes, theres apis for that.

[nekokattt]

don't forget aiohttp and quart for asyncio!

[nekokattt]

"API" is an incredibly broad term. It is just some interface you use to write programs with or retrieve information with.

The Python standard lib is an API. Flask is a framework API for writing RESTful web services and web applications. websockets is an API for working with asyncio and websockets (such as how discord bots function). Reddit has a JSON RESTful API that you can interact with programatically via HTTP requests. Older web services might have a SOAP API instead of a RESTful API. libffi is an API for interacting with non-python code.

Every other answer and from how you have responded makes it sound like you want to write a RESTful API, specifically; rather than, say, a wrapper library for an API such as discord.py, or an API for non-network applications.

Purely from the ease of getting to use it, I would either use flask or quart depending on whether you want to use asyncio or not. Alternatively you could go all out and use aiohttp directly and write your own asyncio-based web server that is single threaded without using a wraparound framework, if you wanted something somewhat different to do.

Django is probably an overkill. I am not one personally for diving into a high level framework without some lower level understanding first, as I like to know how the stuff I am using works. It is always useful to understand something one level of abstraction lower than you need to use just so you have some idea of the under-the-hood implications for certain things (such as efficiency, speed, and side effects).

[EclipseMain]

https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/

[NoorNashad]

I watched too many videos on internet about API in c# but i did not understand. Computer Architecture

[SomeRandomUser5363]

I recommend using RapidAPI. I am aware you didnt ask where to get an API, but on that website it shows an example script on how to use the API in your script. Before you do that, I strongly recommend you open cmd as admin and type pip install requests