Tag Archives: api

06 Aug
2020

Creating a Simple OpenAPI Spec

Having API descriptions in your workflow is a game-changer, but how do you get from nothing to a functioning spec in the first place? I recently made a very simple spec for a very simple API, and thought it might make a good example for anyone looking to create a spec for the first time. OpenAPI specs are very verbose so this very tiny API makes quite a manageable example! Continue reading →
23 Jul
2020

Using Environments in Postman

I’m using Postman more lately and showing off the Environments feature really often. I really like this feature for giving easy ways to handle values I use frequently, but it seems to be a bit of a hidden gem, so I thought I’d write about when I find it useful, in case you do too! Continue reading →
22 Jul
2020

Planets and Webhooks: a simple Flask app

As a Developer Advocate for an API company, I spend a lot of time talking about APIs and webhooks and HTTP in general. Recently I’ve been focussing on HTTP tools, but I really wanted a very simple example API that I could use that would return JSON but really let me focus on the tools, not the API. So I created a “Planets and Webhooks” API with a couple of GET endpoints to return JSON data, and another endpoint to receive and log incoming webhook data. Continue reading →
18 Feb
2020

Teach Your API Test Platform to Send Callbacks

I already wrote about using Prism as an API test platform but I didn’t include an example with callbacks so this post is to fill that gap! If you didn’t read the previous post, the tl;dr is that Prism is a nodejs open source tool that can take your OpenAPI specification and then do an impression of your live API, validating the API calls sent to it and responding with the example data described in the spec. It can also follow up the API response and send an HTTP request of its own to mock the callbacks described in your OpenAPI spec. Continue reading →
13 Aug
2018

Using Config Files with Ngrok

I’m a huge fan of Ngrok, a tool to create a secure tunnel to your laptop. It is brilliant for testing, well, anything running locally really. Someone asked me about my setup recently and I’m using a couple of config files to keep things quick and consistent, so I thought I’d share here what I shared with them.

You can use a central config file for ngrok, and/or specific config files for each project. I use both, so I’ll show you around my setup. Continue reading →

22 May
2018

Relative Links with IBM Cloud API Gateway

I work quite a bit with serverless tech, particularly on IBM Cloud since I work there. At the moment I’m building a microservice using web actions. When a user creates data with a POST request, I want to redirect them to the URL of the new thing they created – but for that I need to know the URL that it was accessed with. This is a relatively new feature on API Gateway so here’s a quick howto for grabbing that URL in both JavaScript and PHP. Continue reading →
21 Nov
2017

Testing API calls in PHP with Guzzle Mocks

I’m working on a CouchDB library for PHP, and so I needed to write some tests for it. CouchDB has an HTTP API so I’m basically making web requests and while I could certainly set up a test database and run full-on integration tests, there are a few limitations with that approach. Firstly: it means I’m testing the database as well, which isn’t what I want and brings extra dependencies that make the tests harder to run. Also: I want to be able to test error cases, rate limiting and so on, that would be difficult to recreate reliably. Continue reading →
26 May
2015

Recover Bitly Bundle Data

For some years I’ve been creating a bundle of links covering articles I recommend for various topics in the Zend Certified Engineer Exam (if you can here looking for the bundle itself, it’s at http://lornajane.net/zce-links-collection). This was done using bitly’s bundles feature, which I thought was a great way to share links. In fact I had 10-15 bundles that I had created from collating all the links in a particular training course or talk, so that people didn’t have to try to write down URLs as I went along. Unfortunately they sunset their bundles and then removed them completely, and I missed the announcement (it all happened quite quickly, they’d seen some abuse of the feature, it’s free, all totally reasonable) BUT they also didn’t respond to my support questions about how to recover the 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. Continue reading →

05 Mar
2014

What Does URI Stand For?

I get a lot of complaints about an API that I maintain (http://api.joind.in) which is “missing” the ID field. This ID field is the database’s primary key; if the user doesn’t have access to the database (they don’t), then it seems to me that the primary key probably isn’t all that useful.

Instead, the API publishes each record with a unique uri field. If this record is referred to by another record, then this full identifier will be used in every case. If this record should be included in a collection, this exact same identifier will be used there, too. You can reach the resource directly by requesting its URI. In the same way that we might refer to a website by its URL, we refer to records in RESTful systems by their URI*. If you need to store these somewhere for your own use, you can use whatever key you like with the local storage, you may even choose to use the uri field as it is unique.

* URI stands for Unique Resource Identifier