Recover Bitly Bundle Data
It turns out, it’s an undocumented feature on their API, so here is everything I know about recovering your bundle data, including the script I used to rescue my own data.
Bundle Data Via API
The endpoint you want is /v3/user/link_history and the documentation is here: http://dev.bitly.com/user_info.html#v3_user_link_history. Many MANY thanks to @jehiah for tweeting this information at me, it was a huge help! What they omitted to mention is that you’ll also find a “tags” array in the values for each link as well (I assume the documentation will update really soon).
Bitly also has an API browser so you may be able to get your data out through that without needing code. I’m a programmer though so I wrote a script …
Bitly Bundle Rescue Script
Here’s my scratty script to export data. You need to do 3 things to use this:
- Add
guzzlehttp/guzzleto yourcomposer.jsonfile and install it - Use the instructions in the comment at the top to get your access token (or use the bitly web interface https://bitly.com/a/oauth_apps)
- Look around line 55 and comment/uncomment as appropriate depending on whether you want a CSV export or an HTML output
<?php require "vendor/autoload.php"; /* * To request access token: * curl -u "username:password" -X POST "https://api-ssl.bitly.com/oauth/access_token" * * Composer: composer require "guzzlehttp/guzzle": "~5.3" */ $access_token = 'GenerateYourOwn'; $client = new GuzzleHttp\Client(); $offset = 0; $limit = 100; while(true) { $response = $client->get('https://api-ssl.bitly.com/v3/user/link_history', ["query" => [ 'access_token' => $access_token, 'limit' => $limit, 'offset' => $offset, ]]); if($response->getStatusCode() == 200) { $responseData = json_decode($response->getBody(), true); if(!$responseData) { echo "Something went wrong, we got: "; echo $response->getBody(); exit; } // actual processing can begin now foreach($responseData['data']['link_history'] as $link) { // skip private links, probably don't want to publish these if($link['private']) { continue; } // skip archived links, presumably we don't need them if($link['archived']) { continue; } // skip records with no tags if(empty($link['tags'])) { continue; } // to search for a specific tag // if(!in_array("ZCE 5_5 Study Links", $link['tags'])) { // continue; // } // uncomment for CSV output echo $link['link'] . ", " . $link['long_url'] . ", " . $link['title'] . ", " . implode(", ", $link['tags']) . "\n"; // uncomment for HTML output // echo "<li><a href=\"" . $link['long_url'] . "\" target=\"_blank\">" . $link['title'] . "</a>"; // echo " (" . implode(", ", $link['tags']) . ")"; // echo "</li>\n"; } if($responseData['data']['result_count'] > ($offset + $limit)) { $offset += $limit; } else { // no more results - stop looping break; } } else { var_dump($response); exit; } }
This isn’t the most elegant in the world but it does recover your data which is all I really wanted. I ended up putting my links onto a basic page on my wordpress blog – at least then nobody else can unexpectedly turn it off! I don’t know how widely used the bundles were but if you would like to get the data that you had stored there, hopefully this helps! Other tips, tricks, suggestions and so on are all very welcome – just leave me a comment.