Create Beautiful API Documentation with these Tools

The reason behind the same is no matter how good an API is for creating and extending your software services, it could be unusable if the developers cannot understand how it works.

Besides, developers are precise, analytical, and always on-the-go to solve critical issues with an API. Hence, catering to them sometimes becomes a tricky business.

This is where the need for API documentation arises.

So, let’s explore a few things about API documentation and how it helps.

What is the API documentation?

documentation-1

API documentation refers to technical content with clear instructions regarding how an API works, its capabilities, and how to use it. It can be written by a technical writer and is readable to both humans and machines.

The purpose of API documentation is:

To work as a precise reference source capable of describing the API thoroughly.
To act as a teaching tool and guide to help users get familiar with the API and use it.

A comprehensive manual containing the entire information needed to work with a specific API such as functions, arguments, return types, classes, and more in a structured layout. The document also includes examples and tutorials to support the information.

API documentation must be easy to digest by the users or developers who want to solve a certain problem. The elements of good API documentation include:

A quick guide to starting the API
Authentication data
API call explanations
Example of request as well as error messages, response description, etc.
Code samples for JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, any other programming languages
If available, SDK examples to explain how users can access all the resources

#development #api

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Create Beautiful API Documentation with these Tools

Easter Deckow

1655630160

PyTumblr: A Python Tumblr API v2 Client

PyTumblr

Installation

Install via pip:

$ pip install pytumblr

Install from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/tumblr/pytumblr.git
$ cd pytumblr
$ python setup.py install

Usage

Create a client

A pytumblr.TumblrRestClient is the object you'll make all of your calls to the Tumblr API through. Creating one is this easy:

client = pytumblr.TumblrRestClient(
    '<consumer_key>',
    '<consumer_secret>',
    '<oauth_token>',
    '<oauth_secret>',
)

client.info() # Grabs the current user information

Two easy ways to get your credentials to are:

The built-in interactive_console.py tool (if you already have a consumer key & secret)
The Tumblr API console at https://api.tumblr.com/console
Get sample login code at https://api.tumblr.com/console/calls/user/info

Supported Methods

User Methods

client.info() # get information about the authenticating user
client.dashboard() # get the dashboard for the authenticating user
client.likes() # get the likes for the authenticating user
client.following() # get the blogs followed by the authenticating user

client.follow('codingjester.tumblr.com') # follow a blog
client.unfollow('codingjester.tumblr.com') # unfollow a blog

client.like(id, reblogkey) # like a post
client.unlike(id, reblogkey) # unlike a post

Blog Methods

client.blog_info(blogName) # get information about a blog
client.posts(blogName, **params) # get posts for a blog
client.avatar(blogName) # get the avatar for a blog
client.blog_likes(blogName) # get the likes on a blog
client.followers(blogName) # get the followers of a blog
client.blog_following(blogName) # get the publicly exposed blogs that [blogName] follows
client.queue(blogName) # get the queue for a given blog
client.submission(blogName) # get the submissions for a given blog

Post Methods

Creating posts

PyTumblr lets you create all of the various types that Tumblr supports. When using these types there are a few defaults that are able to be used with any post type.

The default supported types are described below.

state - a string, the state of the post. Supported types are published, draft, queue, private
tags - a list, a list of strings that you want tagged on the post. eg: ["testing", "magic", "1"]
tweet - a string, the string of the customized tweet you want. eg: "Man I love my mega awesome post!"
date - a string, the customized GMT that you want
format - a string, the format that your post is in. Support types are html or markdown
slug - a string, the slug for the url of the post you want

We'll show examples throughout of these default examples while showcasing all the specific post types.

Creating a photo post

Creating a photo post supports a bunch of different options plus the described default options * caption - a string, the user supplied caption * link - a string, the "click-through" url for the photo * source - a string, the url for the photo you want to use (use this or the data parameter) * data - a list or string, a list of filepaths or a single file path for multipart file upload

#Creates a photo post using a source URL
client.create_photo(blogName, state="published", tags=["testing", "ok"],
                    source="https://68.media.tumblr.com/b965fbb2e501610a29d80ffb6fb3e1ad/tumblr_n55vdeTse11rn1906o1_500.jpg")

#Creates a photo post using a local filepath
client.create_photo(blogName, state="queue", tags=["testing", "ok"],
                    tweet="Woah this is an incredible sweet post [URL]",
                    data="/Users/johnb/path/to/my/image.jpg")

#Creates a photoset post using several local filepaths
client.create_photo(blogName, state="draft", tags=["jb is cool"], format="markdown",
                    data=["/Users/johnb/path/to/my/image.jpg", "/Users/johnb/Pictures/kittens.jpg"],
                    caption="## Mega sweet kittens")

Creating a text post

Creating a text post supports the same options as default and just a two other parameters * title - a string, the optional title for the post. Supports markdown or html * body - a string, the body of the of the post. Supports markdown or html

#Creating a text post
client.create_text(blogName, state="published", slug="testing-text-posts", title="Testing", body="testing1 2 3 4")

Creating a quote post

Creating a quote post supports the same options as default and two other parameter * quote - a string, the full text of the qote. Supports markdown or html * source - a string, the cited source. HTML supported

#Creating a quote post
client.create_quote(blogName, state="queue", quote="I am the Walrus", source="Ringo")

Creating a link post

title - a string, the title of post that you want. Supports HTML entities.
url - a string, the url that you want to create a link post for.
description - a string, the desciption of the link that you have

#Create a link post
client.create_link(blogName, title="I like to search things, you should too.", url="https://duckduckgo.com",
                   description="Search is pretty cool when a duck does it.")

Creating a chat post

Creating a chat post supports the same options as default and two other parameters * title - a string, the title of the chat post * conversation - a string, the text of the conversation/chat, with diablog labels (no html)

#Create a chat post
chat = """John: Testing can be fun!
Renee: Testing is tedious and so are you.
John: Aw.
"""
client.create_chat(blogName, title="Renee just doesn't understand.", conversation=chat, tags=["renee", "testing"])

Creating an audio post

Creating an audio post allows for all default options and a has 3 other parameters. The only thing to keep in mind while dealing with audio posts is to make sure that you use the external_url parameter or data. You cannot use both at the same time. * caption - a string, the caption for your post * external_url - a string, the url of the site that hosts the audio file * data - a string, the filepath of the audio file you want to upload to Tumblr

#Creating an audio file
client.create_audio(blogName, caption="Rock out.", data="/Users/johnb/Music/my/new/sweet/album.mp3")

#lets use soundcloud!
client.create_audio(blogName, caption="Mega rock out.", external_url="https://soundcloud.com/skrillex/sets/recess")

Creating a video post

Creating a video post allows for all default options and has three other options. Like the other post types, it has some restrictions. You cannot use the embed and data parameters at the same time. * caption - a string, the caption for your post * embed - a string, the HTML embed code for the video * data - a string, the path of the file you want to upload

#Creating an upload from YouTube
client.create_video(blogName, caption="Jon Snow. Mega ridiculous sword.",
                    embed="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40pUYLacrj4")

#Creating a video post from local file
client.create_video(blogName, caption="testing", data="/Users/johnb/testing/ok/blah.mov")

Editing a post

Updating a post requires you knowing what type a post you're updating. You'll be able to supply to the post any of the options given above for updates.

client.edit_post(blogName, id=post_id, type="text", title="Updated")
client.edit_post(blogName, id=post_id, type="photo", data="/Users/johnb/mega/awesome.jpg")

Reblogging a Post

Reblogging a post just requires knowing the post id and the reblog key, which is supplied in the JSON of any post object.

client.reblog(blogName, id=125356, reblog_key="reblog_key")

Deleting a post

Deleting just requires that you own the post and have the post id

client.delete_post(blogName, 123456) # Deletes your post :(

A note on tags: When passing tags, as params, please pass them as a list (not a comma-separated string):

client.create_text(blogName, tags=['hello', 'world'], ...)

Getting notes for a post

In order to get the notes for a post, you need to have the post id and the blog that it is on.

data = client.notes(blogName, id='123456')

The results include a timestamp you can use to make future calls.

data = client.notes(blogName, id='123456', before_timestamp=data["_links"]["next"]["query_params"]["before_timestamp"])

Tagged Methods

# get posts with a given tag
client.tagged(tag, **params)

Using the interactive console

This client comes with a nice interactive console to run you through the OAuth process, grab your tokens (and store them for future use).

You'll need pyyaml installed to run it, but then it's just:

$ python interactive-console.py

and away you go! Tokens are stored in ~/.tumblr and are also shared by other Tumblr API clients like the Ruby client.

Running tests

The tests (and coverage reports) are run with nose, like this:

python setup.py test

Author: tumblr
Source Code: https://github.com/tumblr/pytumblr
License: Apache-2.0 license

#python #api

Marcelle Smith

1598437740

A Simple Guide to API Development Tools

APIs can be as simple as 1 endpoint for use by 100s of users or as complex as the AWS APIs with 1000s of endpoints and 100s of thousands of users. Building them can mean spending a couple of hours using a low-code platform or months of work using a multitude of tools. Hosting them can be as simple as using one platform that does everything we need or as complex as setting up and managing ingress control, security, caching, failover, metrics, scaling etc.

What they all have in common are three basic steps to go from nothing to a running API.

Each of these steps has its own set of tools. Here are some I’ve used and popular alternatives.

Design

REST is the most popular API interface and has the best tooling. Our design output for REST services always includes an OpenAPI specification. The specification language can be tricky to get right in JSON (how many curly brackets?) or YAML (how many spaces?) so a good editor saves a lot of time.

Four popular ones are:

I’ve only used Swagger and Postman but both Insomnia and Stoplight look interesting. All of them offer additional functionality like documentation, testing and collaboration so are much more than just specification generators.

#api #apis #api-development #restful-api #rest-api #development-tools #app-development-tools #developer-tools

Autumn Blick

1602851580

54% of Developers Cite Lack of Documentation as the Top Obstacle to Consuming APIs

Recently, I worked with my team at Postman to field the 2020 State of the API survey and report. We’re insanely grateful to the folks who participated—more than 13,500 developers and other professionals took the survey, helping make this the largest and most comprehensive survey in the industry. (Seriously folks, thank you!) Curious what we learned? Here are a few insights in areas that you might find interesting:

API Reliability

Whether internal, external, or partner, APIs are perceived as reliable—more than half of respondents stated that APIs do not break, stop working, or materially change specification often enough to matter. Respondents choosing the “not often enough to matter” option here came in at 55.8% for internal APIs, 60.4% for external APIs, and 61.2% for partner APIs.

Obstacles to Producing APIs

When asked about the biggest obstacles to producing APIs, lack of time is by far the leading obstacle, with 52.3% of respondents listing it. Lack of knowledge (36.4%) and people (35.1%) were the next highest.

#api #rest-api #apis #api-first-development #api-report #api-documentation #api-reliability #hackernoon-top-story

Domingo Jakubowski

1595396220

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Autumn Blick

1601381326

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
Other notes were made to support future research.
You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway