APIs for Beginners: What They Are and How to Use Them (2023)

this course is an excellent introduction to apis for beginners this is an updated version of what is already one of the

most popular API courses on the internet Craig Dennis is back as the instructor and in my opinion he is one of the best

developer Educators out there hello I'm Craig and I'm a developer in this course we're going to be exploring a term that

you've probably heard quite a bit that term is API or application programming interface in addition to being able to

recite what it stands for when you complete this course you'll be able to discuss what an API does you'll

understand why they exist and you'll be able to list the many benefits that they provide you'll even get some hands-on

experience using a few popular web apis which will give you a taste of what all this excitement is about we'll be

starting from the very beginning so there really isn't too much I'm going to be expecting you to know before starting

this course I would like to request that you have a touch of experience with coding and a we bit of knowledge about

the web if you've written any program at all even the typical first program you know the one where you write the words

hello world if you've done that in any programming language you'll pretty much be ready for this course it will be

helpful if you have a basic understanding of how the web works with web servers and browsers but don't sweat

it we'll touch on that too now if you haven't met these requirements please check the notes attached to this video

for where to get started with some beginning web and programming Concepts that reminds me you should take some

time to get used to your learning environment the notes that I just just discussed are attached to this video and

I'll also drop more information into that section to keep you updated on what might have changed from my right now to

your right now and I I'll do my best to remind you to look in there when there's something I think you just have to see

but you really should get in the habit of checking that area out there'll be tons of Juicy information

there you might be getting a real bad case of deja vu right now this is a refresh of a course from 2019 which

these days seems like about 30 years ago or something if if you saw that version welcome back technology is constantly

evolving and just updating the notes wasn't cutting it so this is version two thanks for all the feedback by the way a

lot of yours and your fellow learner suggestions are implemented in this new updated version all that to say we got

you these videos have captions so if you feel like you might benefit from having those on please use them this space is

all yours if you want me to speak slower please use the speed controllers to slow me down and if I'm taking a long time

speed me up I make a pretty good chipmunk and last but certainly not least take advantage of the fact that

you are in a video-based course if you need me to repeat myself use the video controls to rewind me if you feel like

you need to take a break to let something and seek in by all means please pause me I'll be right here

waiting for you I know that I've gotten into some pretty bad viewing habits with all the streaming media now while

binging might be a great way to consume an entire season of your favorite show it's not the best way to learn something

new education isn't meant to be binged and because of this I'll probably remind you quite a bit to take breaks and

encourage you to let what you just learned marinate all right let's get to it a p those three little letters

generate quite the buzz don't they first I'd like to take some time up front here and clearly break down what is meant by

application programming interface by understanding its purpose and a touch of its history I think you'll start to see

its importance and be begin to understand why this term keeps popping up in your life after we get a good

grasp on the what and the why of apis we'll go and learn how to explore two existing ones we'll get familiar with

several handy tools that you can use to interact with web-based apis we'll use those tools to hit an external web API

to send actual text messages and we'll get some interesting data back from a streaming music service API once we get

some practice using the apis we'll use them in a web application that you'll actually publish the application that

we're going to be building is going to receive User submitted photos via a text message and then we'll use an API to

display a collection of all these photos and you get to come up with the prompt send me the latest photo on your phone

dog pics please what's for dinner what whatever you want I can't wait to see what you build and what your family and

friends submit to it we're going to be strictly using apis in this course we won't be writing our own while you most

likely are going to end up learning some best practices in ABI design we won't be covering that specifically there there

are many great courses available that show The Creation thought process and I've linked to some of my faves in the

notes attached to this video in my opinion the best way to start learning about any acronym is to focus on each

individual letter for a pi I I think we should start on that last character the ey interface let's talk a bit about the

interfaces that you've seen already interfaces are all around us for instance this radio here it has a

familiar interface the interface allows me to do things like change the volume change the station I can turn it off and

on I literally have no idea how anything inside this thing works but still the interface allows me to control the way

that it works through the options that are exposed and that's pretty great isn't it the magic that is happening is

completely abstracted away from me I'm still in control of what has been determined that I a user can handle

interfaces usually evolve over time like an alarm clock radio for example it has my familiar volume and station controls

and it also adds some new features like changing the time and setting the alarm I still have no idea how this works

implementation wise but the interface is something that I can understand usually and as technology evolves and

new options come into existence they make their way into the new versions of the interface still abstracting away

things for us but enabling us to be in control of the new features sometimes these physical interfaces get so

recognizable they even make it into goys hey did you hear that there it is again gooey GUI graphical user interface this

is my streaming music app on my phone there's my familiar play button in the user interface or UI and I know what the

play button does when I press it but I have no idea how it does it and I'm okay with that level of abstraction what

would I do in public transit without music like talk to people hi how's it going now the developer who wrote this

streaming music of course understands how the play button Works she coded the button so that when it gets clicked the

music starts playing here's the thing though our developer is also working with quite a few interfaces that are

abstracting way some of the details for her for instance she wrote code that happens when the button is clicked she

probably did that using an event handler on the button like on click what she didn't have to do however was write the

code that makes the button interact and change with a press she didn't have to write the code that makes that familiar

clicking noise it was already there for her buttons are in fact an interface they provide the developer the means of

controlling its interactions while abstracting away how that actually works implementation wise this button is part

of the API or application programming interface and it's available from the application framework that was used to

create the app because most apps need buttons this interface has been created and provided to our developer or

application programmer to use by implementing the button interface our developer was able to make her code run

when the button was clicked it's worth noting that the code probably also uses a media player API that is provided with

the operating system of the device like Android or iOS this media player API abstracts away needing to understand

details of how to send audio data to Hardware the developer knows they just want to call the play Method on the

media player API I suppose too the song isn't stored on the device it's being streamed over

the network so a web-based API call has been made over the internet to get that data it's actually apis all the way down

to the ones and zeros providing abstractions at many levels so let's take a look at what all of these

interfaces have in common they all Define ways for us to interact or communicate with an object whether that

object be physical or software and as a user of the interface we don't need to understand the implementation we don't

need to know how it works we just need to know what we've been allowed to change or see interfaces abstract away

the implementation now while the UI or user interface is made for the user of the application the API is made for the

application programmer to use and extend in their applications with the I covered in our API let's take a deeper look at

the rest of the API acronym an API is a contract of sorts it defines how it is expected to be used

and it defines what you can expect to receive by using it think of it as a set of tools designed for software

developers like yourself to use an API is created to help make your life easier by giving you access to data and by

providing you with an abstraction of the implementation you know not needing to know how it's doing whatever it's doing

they save you from needing to create everything yourself like when designed well they make nearly impossible things

happen with just a few lines of code now you're probably starting to see why it's important to get familiar with them

right I want to do a quick word of warning here about some naming issues that you'll probably run into these days

the term API is almost always used as a way to explain web-based apis in fact it's probably safe to assume that when

you hear API in the wild it's most likely that people are talking about a web- based API we'll explore those here

in a few however if we focus on all types of apis instead of just the webbased subset we'll get a better look

into why web-based apis are so popular so hang tight we're getting there apis are everywhere in your software Journey

just about everywhere you look your your programming language whichever one that might be provides many apis let's take a

look at one that is common in all of them they all provide some way of working with strings you know like a

series of characters want to make your text all uppercase just call the API method and voila you could probably

create the uppercase string all by yourself by doing some sort of lowlevel bit math on each character but you don't

need to because your programming language has abstracted a way that for you and provided a handy string API it

exists this because this is a common enough problem that developers run into because these programming language

specifications are just interfaces different operating systems can supply their own implementation so that the

code works properly in their environment I think an easy way of picturing this is to think about how different operating

systems like Windows or Mac OS maintain their files they're totally different yet your programming language provides a

single API for working with the file system you can write one script and it works both in math

and windows it's the implementation that takes care of all of the details for you pretty cool right definitely something

to be thankful for it makes their lives so much easier not having to worry about what operating system is being used and

the importance of an API tool language cannot be understated there have been some fascinating legal cases where it's

been questioned if the language API itself again not the implementation can be copyrighted check out the notes for

more on that along similar lines there are different web browsers you know like Google Chrome Microsoft Edge Safari

Firefox Brave now you might not have pondered this before but isn't it amazing that you can write code for the

web and it will work in any of them this works because there's a set of web apis that web browsers all must Implement in

order to make that magic happen for you we're standing on the shoulders of giants folks and we really should thank

those giants more often there are authors and maintainers of libraries that package up code to solve common

problems so that you don't need to do it yourself for instance do you know know how to programmatically make a photo

black and white me neither but I can download and import an image package into my application and suddenly I can I

just call a method and boom I wish real life skills work this way I'd import dancing so it could be more fun at

weddings chaa cha Frameworks provide an API that allow you to extend what has been provided to make it your own like

for example most web Frameworks provide you with the ability to add a new route to your web application it allows you to

write out Dynamic data to a template that you specified and you do all of this with just a handful of lines of

code you don't need to understand how it's doing things but you do need to know how to write an implementation to

what the framework is expecting in this case you're using the API the contract to write a valid implementation that

meets the requirements now all these apis that we just talked about they're local to our codebase they exist within

our code we use them to avoid recreating the wheel that is to say they assist us in accomplishing tasks that we need to

perform by abstracting away a ton of the work for us the stuff that we developers shouldn't be worrying about we should be

focusing on the business problem at hand and that means a big part of your job is figuring out how to leverage these apis

to your advantage now I think this is an excellent time for you to take a break I just gave you a lot to think about and

I'd like you to take some time and breathe why don't you jot down some apis that you've used today even if you

weren't coding I know that you've seen some in action if you're having a hard time thinking of some I'll give you a

hint you're watching a video right now inside of a web browser when we return we'll explore the concept of remote apis

ones that aren't executing locally in our codebase and why that is such a powerful concept

[Music] it took me a while to find this remote control it was in the couch it's always

on the couch anyways this remote has an interface on it right there's a power button and when I press the channel

button it changes the channel when I press the volume button it sends the request to my radio and the volume

changes as if I turn the volume up using the interface on the device itself and we know why that's important I want to

remotely control my device I don't want to get up from my chair there are of course more less lazy reasons as to why

we'd want to remote Ely control objects this cute little robot for instance has a remote API you can send commands to it

and it responds and it even sends back sensor information these traffic signs can change based on an API call this

drone here is remotely controlled by an app on my phone see and it's not just physical objects

that benefit from remote apis often times we don't have space on our local machines for all the data that's

available like for example have you ever used use one of those apps that helps you figure out what song is playing you

send up a snippet of a song that you heard playing at a grocery store using your microphone and it sends back

exactly what song it is it's usually Phil cins it turns out that both grocery stores and yours truly love Phil Colin

you don't have room for all the songs in the world on your phone and with this remote API you don't need to have all of

them it does all the searching and processing and it's surprisingly quick how can it possibly do that I don't know

but I love the interface it's so fast ooh that's another benefit of remote apis computational power because an API

removes the limitations of your local device you can gain access to seemingly infinite amounts of power a good example

of this is the AR app of Google translate you can use the camera on your phone and in near real time it's able to

translate directly to your screen like instantaneously it's using a ton of processing power to make that magic

happen and that processing is happening elsewhere in L Nu it took quite a bit of experimentation and some evolution of

ideas but over time we finally turned this remote API dream into a reality now I'm going to drop some history into the

teacher notes but I just want you to know that the struggle to achieve this concept of remote apis was very real now

most of the problem was that there wasn't a standard that everyone loved things were pretty clunky for a while as

these ideas were sused out but then it happened a new architectural style appeared that was clear and allowed us

developers to interact with specific resources over the web and it quite literally changed everything this style

rapidly emerged as a winner and just about everyone began offering and consuming external apis over the

internet and what I'm talking about here is rest or representational state transfer it was the approach that we

needed and honestly it's the abstraction that we developers deserve like we talked about already the popularity of

rest spread so rapidly that it nearly completely overtook the term API it's like how we use the word Xerox to mean

photocopy even though Xerox is just a brand of photocopier Xerox does other stuff too I think that's how pervasive

rest is rest is for sure not the end all be all of remote apis there are definitely some limitations which we'll

discuss here in a bit technolog is ever evolving and of course there's movements that are still advancing the concept of

the best remote apis some terms you might even have heard like graphql more on this in the teacher notes now for the

rest of this course we're going to do a deep dive into apis that are written using the rest style when apis embrace

the style and constraints of rest they are said to be restful cute right if you feel like you need a little rest go

ahead and pause me before we do a deeper dive into what it means to be restful sorry that was a bad and obvious joke

but as a developer you kind of have to make it you don't really have an option because rest sits on top of web

Technologies like a really nice hat we should probably do a whirlwind refresher of how the web

[Music] works it might have been a while since you thought about how the web works

there are a smattering of terms that I'd like to reload into your working memory before we talk more about how rest uses

them so let's use the web I've got my computer here and on it is an internet

browser the browser is a web client and I'm going to use it to connect to a server I'm going to do this by putting a

location in the address bar a universal resource locator or URL to be exact you might also hear this referred to by its

suet term URI Universal resource identifier now our URL here has a scheme portion and this one happens to be h TTP

HTTP stands for hypertext transfer protocol let's break that down a bit let's grab that last part protocol a

protocol is also often liken to a contract it's a little lower level than an API but it's similar in concept you

can think of it as defining the expectations of how to communicate like an example that I think really sticks

with me is if you've ever been to a rally and someone does one of those chants where they're like when I say Foo

you say bar Foo bar one of those those here let's do one when I say HTT you say p HTT HTT oh I just realized I might

have made you yell pee out loud hope you aren't in a coffee shop awkward anyways we you and I just set up

a real quick protocol I told you how to respond to my specific request and you would have been breaking our agreed upon

protocol if you yelled anything else but P so the browser creates an HTTP request for you along with the URI it also

specifies a particular HTTP verb in this case it is using the get verb which is used to clarify that this request will

only receive data that is it won't be making any changes the server receives the request that was transferred from

the client there's that second T the server then does the work that it needs to do finally it generates the resulting

webpage and sends back a response to the client my browser in this case the most important part of the response is the

body for a web page that contains the HTML hypertext markup language which gives us the remaining parts the HT of

our acronym hypertext is text that can link to other text in HTML we perform that linking with anchor tags so with

that response the browser renders the page when one of those links are clicked they kick off a brand new HTTP get

request and the process repeats itself over and over in between those clicks though the protocol's done we've made

the request we got the response HTTP as it was originally designed designed is a stateless protocol once that request

receives a response it's all done if you want to keep some sort of State your client will have to manage that itself

and send it up with each new request check out the notes for more on this there are more HTTP verbs also known as

request methods besides get most common scenario you see is when you encounter a form that is used to take information

from you typically you'll see the verb post used to explain that you are submitting or posting data to the Sur

okay so our protocol that's used to transfer this hypertext is admittedly a little more complex than our rally chant

was there's quite a bit of important information in there that is included in the request and the response you've

probably seen query string parameters and URLs and you know the stuff after the question mark this is one way to

pass information about the request another common way this information is passed around is through specific key

and value pairs called headers both requests and responses have headers and they're used to help further communicate

what is wanted as well as what has been sent back some of the popular request headers allow you to specify information

about the content that you expect back like the language or the type of content you can also state that you want the

page if it has changed since a certain time this technique allows for caching which is a powerful concept why get the

whole page if you already have it in your local cach you can embed authentication information in each

request using a header and this way you're essentially keeping your client logged in across requests this response

also contains headers a super important one is the status code this lets you know what happened on the server side

and can convey things like missing documents I'm sure you've seen the old 404 or maybe the page has moved but

hopefully everything is a 200 okay it can also explain the content type how large the data returned is and many more

things okay got it are you feeling good about that little Whirlwind tour remember feel free to make me repeat

myself if that was too much I totally get it that was a lot of information it's important to have a basic

understanding of these things because rest sits on top of them it uses the concepts that were introduced with the

web to expose resources that can be accessed and manipulated let's take a look at how the restful approach takes

advantage of the web and its tooling for your benefit profit rest stands for representational

State transfer apis that meet the rest architectural style constraints are considered to be restful now a typical

way to teach about restful apis is to cover the constraints that Define it all up front now I don't know about you but

personally I find approaching learning that way pretty overwhelming especially from the beginning I mean we haven't

even looked at an API yet on top of that most of the rest apis that you'll use will meet all of these constraints so

here's the thing I promise that we'll go over all the constraints but let's do it on our own time like don't learn them

all right this instant we could even make it a fun Journey like a restful constraint scavenger hunt complete with

prizes void where prohibited here are the guiding architectural constraints required for an API to be considered

restful we'll check them off when we discuss them and then we'll loop back once more at the end to review got to

collect them all sound fun good let's get started talking about how rest API sits on top of web technology like a

little hat much like the web the client makes a request to a server the client in this case is typically going to be

your program and you'll probably be using some sort of library to create the request to the server the protocol used

you guessed it it's HTTP and it's stateless the server won't remember anything about the particular client if

you want to maintain State like your login details you must send it with each and every request you'll do this using

headers and just like that we talked about two of our rest constraints client server architecture and stateless you

got two knocked off already you're on a roll now we should probably talk about what that request was requesting right

well it most certainly was requesting information about a resource now a resource is a little abstract and that's

intentional it's the r in the URL or URI we use the term resource to reference an object also happens to be pretty

abstract right and this is because we can use resources to describe just about anything that we build for instance

let's imagine an ebook store website on the homepage there's a list or collection of new books each of these

books is a resource we click in to take a closer look at that book resource and we see a link to the author which is

also a resource we click into the author resource and we see a collection of all the other books they've written maybe we

even see a group of fans again another collection and each of those fans are a resource clicking into a and resource we

see a collection of their favorite authors in books everything is a resource let's change gears how about an

image sharing application on your phone so we have user resources and those users post photos which are resources

and those photos can be loved so there's a lover resource maybe there's an album that could be created there's an album

resource that contains photos and albums have a collection of contributor resources turns out almost everything we

ever want to build can be expressed in terms of resources and collections most of what we want our

applications to be able to do to the resources can be expressed through the unfortunate sounding acronym crud and

that stands for creating reading updating and deleting now as a user of the ebook site all we did was a bunch of

reading no pun intended I actually did intend that one we were reading right just getting

information to display it like we retrieved the author page we made a read request the web browser used a get

request to the specific author page the restful API follows the same logic your program sends a get request to a URI

then the server responds with data and of course all the HTTP headers you've come to know and love the body is

typically represented these days as Json or JavaScript object notation Json provides a great way to structure and

Nest your data every programming language that I can think of provides some means of turning a Json string into

a native object the content type is typically something that you can specify in your request if Json isn't your thing

if you recall there are other HTTP verbs available these verbs are used in rest apis to clearly State the intention of

your request want to add an author post to the SL author's endpoint and send the data that you want to update in the body

of your request now these fields will be defined for you somewhere want to remove an author send a delete to that specific

author resource updates typically support the patch verb and you'll see we're able to represent our crud needs

the create request update and delete using HTTP methods pretty cool right what this means is that you can interact

with any application out there that's exposed their rest API you could grab data remotely automate tasks and even

smos together different services this is called a mashup and here's the thing there are a ton of apis available just

about anything that you could imagine and if they're truly restful they'll all feel pretty much the same you can build

anything there are services that allow you to do incredible things with just a few simple API calls so now the question

becomes what are you going to build so why don't you take a quick break and when you come back let's explore a

restful API together we'll take a peek at how to use the music streaming service Spotify and their excellent

restful API you have some Newfound understanding of how web-based apis work I walked you

quickly through some imaginary rest apis and now I'm thinking it's time that we get a little more specific why don't we

go exploring together some of these rest apis allow you to give it a try from the comfort of your very own web browser one

of my personal favorites that allows for exploration is the streaming music service Spotify so here I am at

spotify.com and now a quick word of warning it is going to look different I guarantee you this site is going to look

different because they're always making things better for us for us Spotify users us lovers of music and as as well

us developers so uh I want you to try this when you go to a site any site that you want to you'll see here that this is

really nice Spotify is letting us kind of test out what it feels like in in the web on the web page but if I scroll down

to the bottom it's typically where they hide nerdy stuff now I knew this was here but if I

didn't I would look around for something like this this developers and I'm going to click into here oh I cannot tell you

how good it feels as a developer to end up in a place where it feels like you're being taken care of right this is so

nice this Spotify uh for developers it looks like it was thoughtful uh and I can tell you that it is very nice it's a

very nice tool um we can scroll down you can see all sorts of stuff they give you some examples of what you might want to

do right what what could you build with this uh so you could find out like uh uh different things like you could use an

API to see uh uh the beats and the sections and the bars I think that there's a way to figure out if a song is

dancable or not so that maybe I could import dancing we'll see and if I scroll back up to the top here you'll see that

there's these different headings we've got this discover I think this is great if you're going to explore things we

have this docs you'll see that there's all types of different uh actually apis and sdks software development kits which

are apis which allow you to do different things you'll see that there's ones for iOS there's ones for Android what we're

going to be focusing on is the one for the web API so if I click into that we'll get a nice overview of what this

is I'm going to blow this up just a little bit uh so you'll see based on some simple rest representational State

transfer principles that's our uh that's what we're doing that's what we're going through we're going through our um our

scavenger hunt we're going through that there's a Spotify web API that returns Json JavaScript object notation about

music artists albums and tracks right so that's awesome that's great uh so we can see all sorts of different stuff it uh

it opens up at this api. spotify.com is a specific URL and then it has a set of endpoints with it each unique path right

each of those URLs that we were looking at before there is a way to get um specific

data so you could do this thing for you where you authorize so I could uh I could be a user you could see what I

recently listened to I could have a playlist I could add to it but in order to do that you need to have uh

authorization to be able to do that you don't want to be able to just add to anybody's playlist right so um there is

some authorization that's available and uh we're not going to do anything that requires that here so uh if you keep on

looking down here you'll see that there's uh it's it's based on those rest principles um and uh you'll see that it

does a get to retrieve resources right and there's the post to create resources and resources here are uh songs and

artists and tracks maybe maybe the resource you're creating here is one of those playlists that we talked about uh

you can change using a put and a delete we delete the resource so awesome right so it's using rest uh like we saw you'll

see that Spotify uses this URI uh style so it's a Spotify track and then uh it has this unique ID this Spotify ID this

will make more sense as we we uh uh dig into it a little bit more uh and then you'll see that there's always this uh

uh spot ify URL that allows you uh to see what it was and will show you this um as well as we said uh the responses

come back and they are a Json object uh and we're going to be looking here at a tool uh in in the future called curl

which you can use from your command line that's what this dollar sign here is talking about I I'll show you all this

but basically it's saying that there's a lot of artists that come back you don't want all the artists and it will come

back paginated uh and of course um you can use caching we'll take a look at that here you can you can and uh see if

uh the thing has changed or not so we'll take a look at that and basically the response that comes back if everything's

good it's going to say a 200 or these these 200 level uh accounts and then there's uh bad requests so if uh if you

ask wrong or maybe maybe it wasn't found that's the 404 or unauthorized if we try to do one of those playlists uh we'd get

it unauthorized and there's also if if you're a developer uh you never want to see this one it's the 500 it means you

made an error um uh on the server side uh we won't be we' be doing any of those because we're just going to be hitting

somebody else's code cool all right so um Spotify offers the ability to uh you can look at this and you can build your

own curl request but one of the really nice things that I love about their API and uh you'll you'll find this happens

often if we scroll back up here to the top sorry if I'm making you sick there and we're going to jump in here to uh

what's known as the console over on the left are the things that we can do with their API and one of

the things I want to do first first is I want to search you can see it's making a get to

the search endpoint so I'm going to go into there and what's really nice is it's set it up so that we can kind of

build the query that we're looking for so now we need to decide what we're going to do I think probably the first

uh person that I would ever search for the first artist I would search for uh and you can see that here it's showing

the different values of what that is I would I would probably search for Beyonce I mean right wouldn't you and I

could choose is that a track or an artist so the type there is important and if I type artist uh you'll see that

what's happening is you'll see the curl here is changing it's changing the it says the que is the Beyonce so that's

one of the parameters that we're passing into the API and artist is here and you can see there's different uh things that

we could do here what's really important is that it needs to have this ooth token now what's nice is we can build one of

those even if we don't have a Spotify account so I'm going to do that I'm going to click this get token I am not

currently logged in um and I actually don't have a Spotify account yet in this uh in this user I do have a Spotify

account I love Spotify um and this is asking um basically what you would do is you would create a specific ooth token

if you were ever to use this API outside of where we're doing this right now you would you would create one of these

tokens so that you could log in uh later and you say what it is that you want so here's the playlist right we don't we're

not going to do any of the playlist stuff we're just going to do a search maybe we'll look up some of Beyonce's uh

Tunes but so I'm going to go and I'm going to click this request token so now it's asking me to either log in with my

Spotify account which I can or I can create a new one and let's walk through that just in case you don't have a

Spotify account already let's create a new one and this will be a my uh developer account here um uh so I'm

going to put in my email so my email uh I don't know if you know about this but uh if you use Gmail you can uh uh you

can do a little plus sign and it will still send to the left side of your Gmail so uh I'm going to do uh at

Spotify sign up and uh that way any emails I get from here it will have that and it's a kind of a way to let you have

multiple accounts thing so again uh my my Gmail is Craigs Dennis gmail.com but I'm going to do uh Spotify

signup gmail.com and it will go to my Gmail it will just kind of ignore this Gmail does that for you it's pretty nice

right so I'm going to put in the same password as my luggage which is one 2 three four five six just

kidding uh and uh what should we call you oh you know what I love it when you call me Big

Papa that will appear in my profile I am ready for it and aie it is my birthday on November

19th uh 19 uh let's see what do I I I think wouldn't would be nice if I was born in

1999 um what is your gender oh this is nice how how nice this is like super inclusive um I I love that this is so

inclusive it's like somebody at Spotify went and talked to their people and listened to what people wanted and they

included people who uh who identify as non-binary or other or prefer not to say so like wherever you sit in that I love

uh and hats off to you Spotify for uh being inclusive because inclusivity matters share my registration data uh

sure why not I am not a robot I don't think I am oh oh no uh the images with bicycles that one's got a bike that

one's got a bike that one has a bike what is that garbage there is that this is a bike

lane uh this is a bike okay here we go please I am not a robot thank you all right so I'm G to click sign up oh I I

am male I I I am male so here we go that is how I identify all right I'm going to save uh that log in

and I am going to log in with it so here we go all right so it's asking me if I have

access to this developer console and it will see my logged in as big papa here we go and now you'll notice here that

there is this token here right this is this ooth token that got created for me by Spotify and it's putting it into this

console for me so I can share it now you never want to let your token out if you get a hold of somebody gets a hold of

your token they can do stuff on your behalf and I realize that this is on a uh screen being recorded and I'm going

to get rid of this uh token here in a bit so you will not be able to have it so I've got this token it's filled out

here I'm going to click try it and we're going to do a search for Beyonce let's see what happens so you will see that we

got some information back so we got a list of artists because that's the type that I searched for um and this is the

search that we did uh we'll see some uh external URLs and we think that this is probably her I'm going to see I'm going

to I'm going to grab this really quick but you can kind of see how how things are laid out out here right so uh this

is my Spotify URL for that let's see if this is is her this looks like her yeah yeah

definitely so so great crazy and love uh cuff it I I haven't heard that one yet awesome so uh this is Beyonce great so

we got her we we found her we used this search um uh it has shows how many followers she has wow 32 million good

job uh it tells the genres so we can do all sorts of really cool uh stuff with this and here you'll see

that um I'm getting a URL I'm getting a link that will open up her specific artist page right so so here is is her

ID so if I take her ID I'm going to grab this ID and I'm going to come over here to artists and I can come in here and I

can show all of the artists albums so you'll see It'll be artists slid albums let's see all of the albums that she did

but let's look at that in Json format so uh the artist that I want I'm just going to uh pipe pipe that that ID in there

from before right now it still has my Bearer token the console has done that for

me and uh I can go ahead and do try it and we should see that now it's going to return back albums right so we've made a

get request to the albums and I can see all of the albums uh that she's had here and we can see uh where they're

available in different markets as well looks like she's available in lots of markets all over the world uh who runs

the world all right so here we go uh we're going to look let's see uh these are these are

albums that's the artist there that's the type of the artist let's get one of the albums here let's make sure that we

got it so uh you see that it's got different things like I could get access to maybe the image of what this album is

so let's do that I'm going to post that here open that up and let's see there she is on her horse her her magical

horse there so that's pretty cool right this is this is awesome I can get access to

all sorts of information about an artist I can get bu their ID I can go and find all sorts of different things that I

wanted to do right so so um uh if I knew an album too once I have the ID I could get the ID I could get the tracks um all

sorts of amazing things and then there's these playlists right so you can add a playlist if I wanted to I could post to

create a playlist now of course I need to authenticate to do that and that's a little bit outside of what we're doing

here but I could add um uh put together a playlist for for everybody to do using this API uh and uh again when we looking

at the artists um when we're looking at this get artist it's showing this curl command and we're going to take a look

at that here in a bit but I just want to take a little bit of time I want you to go and take a look go back to this

discover section and kind of get inspired by what's what's available right so so you can look at um there's

these different things where you can you can I was right you can check and see if there's danceability of a song you can

go and find a track and is dancable and you know that Beyonce's songs are going to come back uh very high in the ability

uh thing there but lots of powerful things and there's lots of cool examples that you can do that people have already

gone and built and you can take a look at how they built it and how they use the API uh recommendations this is

awesome really this is like super wide open to you and uh you can do all of this because of the apis that they

provide pretty cool right you can get access to all of spotify's music library and you can build tools that extend

their platform I highly recommend that you go and take a look at what other people have built using these apis it's

super impressive did you notice how fast those results came back how could it do that search so quick oh wait a second

does it even need to those results don't change all the time it's not like Beyonce is dropping a new song every

minute though I wish she would those results are definitely cashable ding ding ding cacheability is also available

on the client and we'll get to that here in a bit but this is a great example of a layered system I'm almost positive

that Spotify has set up things so that it Returns the same Json from its own server side caching mechanism it's not

rendered that on every single request as a user of the API I don't know how it's doing that and frankly I don't care I

want it to be available and fast when I hit that specific URL beyon definitely appreciates how fast the results will

return she might even take that API Dev to Red Lobster let's go ahead and take a quick break during this break I'd love

for you to move around and think about what you might be able to build with that Spotify API for inance

while I was using this API I had this idea pop up when I'm at a music festival I often have a hard time deciding which

band I should go see there's so many now I would love to have an app suggest to me which of the bands that are currently

playing I would most likely enjoy you know based on my listening habits I'm pretty sure that you could build that

just with the Spotify API and using a list of events of the bands that are performing and if you do end up building

that share it with me cuz I need it what other interests do you have that provide an API that you can use check the notes

for more ideas now after you come back from your break let's dive a little deeper and make use of an API using our

own tools see you soon no really take a quick break seriously it'll do you good no binging

[Music] well I realize that exploring an API on a website is informative it might not

feel like you're actually using that API I think the next logical step in exploring is actually making that

request yourself from your computer not from a website now as I pointed out in the Spotify docs there were examples

that were using a command called curl curl is an open source tool that is used to send data back and forth and it runs

locally on your computer and it's awesome for poking around at apis what do you say we explore it a bit okay so

we are back here on our Spotify page and we say that there is a command here that says

curl curl is a command that we can run from our terminal now if both of those terms are new to you command and

terminal this is a great time to head over to the notes and learn about what the terminal is so my operating system

is a Mac and it has an application on it uh called terminal so I'm going to open that up terminal and in fact I'm going

to make this a little bit bigger let's go ahead let's let's take let it take up the whole screen we're going to be in

here for a little bit so I'm going to type clear and clear my window all right so um uh this terminal allows me to

perform actions on my computer like I can make a d text to speech I can do say and I can say hi Mom hi Mom and it says

Hi mom um uh and the Windows operating system has a terminal as well and while it's a little bit different they're

actually pretty quite similar uh but check the notes for more on this so what happens is I write the command and then

I pass in values for the parameter in this case it's high mom now note that I used quotes there because I want to pass

one value even though there is a space if there was a space is kind of how you separate things but with the quotes it's

saying this is one value that I'm passing in we developers spend a lot of time in our terminals so if this is new

to you I want you to remember that it was new to everyone at one time so please take your time and don't let this

get you too frustrated you've got this so I already have curl installed uh I'm going to just go Ahad ahead and make

sure that I Do by typing the word curl and if I see this I can see that I could type curl and then the command-- help

now if I didn't have this installed if this came back with like I don't know what you're talking about when you type

curl the word curl uh that's okay so um uh we're going to head over to the notes uh and you'll get sorted there but the

starting point where you I want you to go is curl. so uh you'll come to this page

you'll see this is a command line tool in library for transferring data since 1998 that logo sure feels like that

doesn't it uh it does all sorts of things what we're really concerned about is this HTTP right we're going to use

this from the command line to get access uh to a URL so if you don't have uh curl on your command line go ahead and pause

me and check out the notes for the best way uh to get this installed on your computer uh there's a lot of different

ways to do it if you come here under uh download you'll see that there's different uh uh operating systems so

you've got your Linux and you've got your Mac OS and if you come down here you've got your windows so there's

different ways of getting things uh installed so go ahead take your time get that installed and when you come back um

I want you to try this I want you to do this thing with me so I'm going to go back to my terminal and uh I'm going to

make sure that it works uh the way that I always like to test is I like to go to um uh I can has dad joke.com uh how do

you get a Al alien to sleep you rock it oh so good anyway that's how you do that um that that'll let you go and it's

going to hit that website and it's going to give you back a joke when you're ready so now that we've got our curl up

and running we've got our successful dad joke let's go ahead and run that command uh from Spotify so I'm going to come

back over to my Spotify thing where I was running the search uh I'm going to make sure that it's still working

actually before I get started cuz these these tokens Can expire and depending on how long your break was it might have

expired but mine is still working so I got this back here and I should be able to get this from my command line and

what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy this and to highlight this this is a uh development practice known by us

developers known as copy pasta so I'm going to copy this and I am going to go back to my terminal and I'm going to

paste um in this long uh list of things here uh what this is doing is is saying hey I want to make a get request to the

api. spotify.com slv1 search remember that's where we were at we were searching and we're passing the query

string of Beyonce and the type of artist and uh we're telling it hey I would like to get back uh Json and uh I am sending

you Json even though we're not actually sending Json the default has that there and this is the important one this is

sending you a header right the d-h is a header and authorization and this is that long token that we had there now if

all is working when I press enter I should get here locally on my machine that uh same list of data that we did

and I did check that out so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come back up here and I am going to grab wow there's

a lot of information here right when this comes back I'm going to grab uh her ID and so I remember that when we were

looking at it it was down in here this ID is this the right one is that the first one so we got items uh no this is

her ID here this is her ID it starts with a six VW you so I'm going to copy that and I'm going to use that I'm going

to go back and remember I'm going to go and I'm going to look I want to see what um what albums she has so I'm going to

come into here uh and I'm going to remember I'm going to paste this this URL here and I'm going to run uh this

make sure that that's still working I'd like you to go ahead and pause me I think I'd like to see can you get her

albums locally on your machine can you go ahead and make sure that you can do the same get artist see all of Beyonce's

out albums on your local machine so here's what we'll do you give it a try um and if you uh once once you get it

once you get it printing locally on your machine um uh you can let me know and then unpause me and I'll show you how I

did it okay are you ready you got this pause [Music]

me cool so how'd you do so here's probably one way that you could have done it is just copied that right copied

this whole thing and paste did it but what I want to show you is that we have access to we know what these these these

URLs are right so we know that there's this V1 artist and in fact uh we can see that there is a a git of slv1 artists

and then you can actually pass their ID in the in the URL there right that's what this ID is here so let's let's just

go back I'm going to show you a little trick too so um I've I've got her ID copied still um so I could have just

just ran that query and copied the curl and pasted it here and if you did that you did it right I just want to show you

a little bit more of what else how we could explore so I'm going to press the up arrow and you'll see um my cursor is

moving here um I'm going to press the option key on Mac I think you press the ALT key uh on Windows you can jump

around like this and I'm going to get rid of what's here and I'm going to say V1

artists right so that's the collection of artists and I have that specific ID right so there's the ID I'm going to

press enter here you'll see that I got back Beyonce which is awesome that's what I did and then remember the artists

have I'm going to go to the front of the line line contr a on Mac uh and I'm going to switch this so artists have uh

this is a specific artist so Beyonce and we want to see Beyonce's SL albums which is what the the console would have uh

generated for you but I just wanted to show you that you can kind of navigate and move through and you'll see that

there's uh there's a bunch of uh different information that comes through here um it's kind of hard to see right

so so um kind of hard to parse and this is something optionally that you can do so I press the up arrow and I'm going to

press pipe into a tool called JQ and uh you'll see that it comes back very nice and pretty right so um this is

something that that is very nice to have uh and I piped that that's this this uh the symbol above uh the the ENT key is

this pipe symbol and it allows you to take whatever happened in this first part of the command and take its results

and put it in this part of the command which is super cool um and again this is in the notes you don't need to you don't

need to worry about this but I know that um I can query things so I can say that of the items I'm only interested in the

name the dot name from each one of the items and this is a little query language that's attached to this JQ uh

program you don't need to do this this is just something if you're doing it from the command line it's something

that we do that we could kind of hack around with a little bit and you'll see I can get all the the lists of her

albums and that's pretty cool right that's powerful and if you are going to just start poking around and moving

around with the URLs one thing I wanted to make sure that you're cautious of is if we come back and we take a look at uh

the the console page here they do a nice trick for you if we back here in search like one of the things that I want to

make sure uh I know that Beyonce has this song that's like something like who runs the world right who runs the world

girls but I don't remember where what album it's on so I'm going to search for a type track and now note that my query

has spaces here now what's happened here is it's done this uh URL encoding so like if you were trying to to mess

around and and work with the search you'd want to make sure that whatever you did you passed that uh with those

those plus signs there so I'm going to run that curl command we'll see who runs the world girls and I going to I see

there's this this uh this open link here so I'm going to go ahead I'm G to open that let's take a look uh make sure this

is the right track I'm pretty sure it is it is not the right track what is this Bim

fim maybe maybe it's some other some other so let's take a look well that that's interesting so uh oh I I just

went to the bottom instead of going to the top so I should have went to the very top of these

result or I should have pulled probably pulled the the name out Rocka by baby there's a Rocka by baby version of this

who okay so when the color stops hope you're not getting sick while this scrolling so Beyonce is the artist

that we want so this is the one we want to hear this song Let's see if I got the right one this time that's just

something you know there's a lot of data coming back here it's kind of hard to do to use on the the command line sometimes

I'm a little clutzy like you just saw here we go let's let's see what happens let's make sure this is

it there it is there's Beyonce not the song I was looking for oh yeah it is who runs the world girls

and now I can listen to that so it's like who runs the world girls it's kind of like who runs the terminal curl boy

that was a that was a big setup just to make that joke I hope that you enjoyed it you can has dad joke curl is an

awesome way to explore apis and you'll find that often just like we saw with Spotify apis will use Curl in their

docks to show you how they work Spotify is just one API and there are so many companies and services out there in fact

some apis are the product like that's what the company's selling to us developers so now that we've been

building up those muscles why don't we take a swing at another API let's use a different API this time

let's use twilio twio is a company that loves apis in fact that's what the company started as more than a decade

ago just a set of apis it started as abstracting away communication channels and by that I mean any way you'd ever

possibly want to communicate with your users want to send a text message there's an API call for that want to

make a phone call there's an API send an email a whatsa message literally whichever way you want to communicate

there's an API for all of them developers embed these apis into their apps and I'm pretty sure that you've

probably used it without even knowing you were now nowadays there's a whole Suite of products that quo offers that

they saw their customers needing but under the covers it's still these apis that are powering

everything I need to be a little up front here with you I love twilio I mean I love it so much I even applied for a

job with them and I got it but even if they didn't hire me I know that I'd still show off how powerful their apis

are I mean with a single command you can send a text message I remember when I first did that I was like w like that

level of abstraction is amazing I mean if you've never thought about it before what even is a text message I mean I

know I have an app on my phone and I can use it to communicate with literally anyone else but how does that work like

there's all those different cell carriers and standards and phone numbers I mean I I have no idea and with twilio

I don't need to know that's the beauty of this API it just works here let me show you all right so here we are at

twilio.com and again a word of warning this is going to look completely different from my right now to your

right now uh so please make sure that you check the notes for anything that might have changed and it's specifically

about this flow that we're about ready to do is we're going to sign up for a trial account so I'm going to click this

sign up button here and this is going to look completely different I know because our team is constantly making this

better uh but the one thing that I want to make sure that you know right now is that you see that there is no credit

card required and it is a free twilio account so I'm going to put my uh information in here and I'm going to use

the same trick that I used uh uh before uh where I do plus and I'm going to say API course uh V2 gmail.com so I uh the

plus side there again a little Gmail trick um uh we're going to go ahead I'm going to put in my password again uh 1 2

3 4 5 six my luggage how many times can I do that joke and then uh would I do this except uh must be 16 or more

characters okay there's some password requirements over there

I think that's 16 all right uh here we go starting my free trial I'm ready let's do

this I'm definitely going to save that long password because I need that for later all right so I have now uh should

have been sent an email so let me make sure that I got that email and I did I am going to click uh

the link to verify it and here we go I'm going to verify my phone number uh to verify I'm human because all humans have

phones so we're going to do 432 527 4274 please don't call too late uh I'm going to try that I'm going to click

verify all right so I got my verification code hey that came very quickly what's wonderful my verification

code uh is 017 869 uh hopefully your code's different

than that wouldn't that be funny if they were all the same uh all right so here we go so which product are we here to

use we're going to use SMS we're going to use the SMS messaging product and what do we plan to build uh let's see uh

of course these questions are going to be different uh what are we going to do we're going to build

um build something else we're going to build something else uh we how do we want to build with with twilio with code

right so we're g end up writing code if we want to with minimal code on top of code samples or no code at all so uh

definitely don't need code to build over here but I'm going to say with code because we're we're developers here um

so what is your preferred coding language we're going to do JavaScript uh even if it's not we're going to be doing

JavaScript for the rest of this uh course and I do want to host my code on twio which is nice there's a nice

serverless option these options like I said are totally going to change just try to answer them as truthfully as you

can so um my billing country is United States uh which is true and I'm going to get

started I'm going to go ahead and walk this I guess let's go ahead and so we'll um I can explore products there's way

more products that are available than you can see here this is what got built based on the menu of what they thought

but if I ever want to I can come to this explore products and get more uh we probably won't need to do that because

we filled out what we're going to do um and this is where you can get access to your logs I'll show that off here in a

bit if there's any problems you'll be able to find them there uh manage your account keys and build trust with your

customers yeah we can build all sorts of different uh uh things in here we probably won't need to do too much here

uh because most of the keys that we have are available to us uh right from this page that we're on actually

so we'll keep going uh and I can see the billing and again uh you're in a trial account and you think you get something

like $15 uh to to try with so we'll be sending text messages using that that trial dollar dollar bills y'all uh so

here we go uh and then you can uh switch between products so you can have multiple accounts right so if you wanted

to come and like explore a little bit do your own personal thing maybe do something for work later uh up to you

there's a 1550 is what we got all right so um and then I'll click next and uh then I can uh anytime I want so I can

look at this tour again uh to help navigate around which is really nice beautiful console um so uh we could

definitely go ahead and uh the first thing that we want to do is we want to get a twio phone

number so I'm going to do that I'm going to click this get twilio phone number and I am so glad that this

happened to me it says that this account has been restricted from provisioning new phone numbers uh which means it

thinks that I might be spam and you know why it is it's because I put that Gmail account with a little plus thing there

so if this happens to you I don't want you to feel offended or anything like that I want you to check the notes for

the latest ways uh to get around this and also I'm going to go right now and I'm going to email compliance review at

twilio.com and I should get that uh up and running if this happen to you go ahead uh press pause check the notes

Here uh for for what to do and I'm going to uh actually uh do that I'm going to press pause here I'm going to get my

account able to uh get a phone number and I will I'll see you back here in 1 second all right so I got all sorted out

so I sent my email to uh the compliance uh folks and I was able to uh say that I was doing a personal account and I'm

learning how to use these apis and they were able to let me get in here so uh what I'm going to do now is when I click

this get a twio phone number we're not going to see that message because I'm coming in and I've got a new phone

number and it automatically gave me this one this one here this 561 uh it Went Away really quick but it's down here

this is my this is my my twio phone number is is 561 816 5433 now this number is mine which is awesome I can

use this uh message I can send messages I can receive messages I can do all sorts of things with this I can make

calls I can receive calls this twilio phone number is mine uh to play with I think we should do just that we should

send a text message now before we get started I want to make sure that you know this this stuff you are on a trial

account so there are some limitations you can only send messages and make calls to verified phone numbers so when

we set things up we verified like I'm able to send a text to myself because I verified my phone number I and it will

say sent from my twio account beforehand uh and there's more things about your trial account too if you wanted to to

get into that so so uh check the notes uh because this this very well could have changed uh but check the notes for

for more on this so let's do it let's send a short message service an SMS I so I'm going to

click here on this docs and support and I'm I click this it's going to open up I'm going to go to these developer docs

these developer docs are some of the best that are available out there u i want you to to see these so we're to

come here under uh SMS because that's what we're doing right short message service and uh under here under these

these sides on the the docks here you can uh collapse these so I'm going to come in here under API reference I'm

going to go to this message resource now um this is a this is an API right so we're we're in the API

reference so the API that we want to do is we want to be able to send uh from and uh we want to say from the phone

number that we just got and we want to send a message to my phone number right so uh we're going to do that and you'll

you'll see that over here on the right um there are uh things that you can do that that that show you what you can do

so with this message we can do all these different things U we'll start with create a message we'll create a message

first so we're going to go uh into this create a message and uh there's these different languages here so we have JS

uh and you can see the style that it looks like we'll take a look at at something like this here real shortly

this is a helper library that wraps around the API so you don't need to do the sorts of things that uh uh we're

we're about ready to have to do you can you could do things a little bit more cleanly but what we're going to look at

is curl right so here's our friend Curl we're going to jump over here to curl and uh the docs have this really nice

thing where I'm able to actually copy this so I'm going to click uh to copy this and I'm going to pop over to my

terminal now again I'm running on a Mac so there's a couple of things here that this is assuming that is going to be

okay because I am running uh on a Mac it's going to assume uh that these slashes see these slashes at the end

here um these uh in on a Mac terminal these show that we're in the new we're making a new line available here and

also you'll see that there's these account SIDS and these off tokens this dollar sign twilio off token dollar sign

twio account Sid um in my terminal on my Mac that is what's known as an environment variable and they've been

set now um I don't have those set currently because I just uh built this account so what I'm going to do is um

kind of bad practice actually I'm going to actually put my real uh information here for us to use so so back back here

on our uh console on our tro console you'll see that I have this thing here called this account Sid or string

identifier so this is my ID my unique ID for the account that I just created so I'm going to go I'm going to click this

copy button so I copied that I'm going to come back here and I'm going to move my mouse and I'm going to remove right

here where it says account Sid so that's string identifier I'm going to paste this so that is the way that twilio is

uh identifying who I am I'm going to go backwards through the rest of these and so uh if you're watching here on Windows

let's just go ahead let's get rid of these uh these new lines here um so I'm going to just put them all on one line

uh we can handle that we'll do that so I'm going to uh get rid of that line and uh that way it will work uh

completely on uh both both Windows and Mac uh for what we're trying to do so I still have my uh account Sid here so I'm

going to keep on backing up here uh and I'm going to get rid of that line there we go and you'll see one more

time here there's the too account Sid that string identifier for my account was still present so I'm G to paste that

there so now the API call that I'm doing is to that specific account it's doing to this messages and you'll note that

it's doing now it's doing a post so because we're creating something new right so we're using post to create a

message and you'll see here that it says from equals and uh the number actually there for the from we want that to be

the twilio number that we just got right so that new one that we just got we're going to say that is sent

from let me go back I'm gonna copy my tlio phone number right so I've got my my 561 number there

and I'm going to paste that here so uh from and the this plus 561 that's a US number so it's got that the it's

called a 10 digigit long code 10 DLC so it's 561 816 5433 is the number that I just bought and uh we're going to say by

default it said hi there um the body of the message right so instead of that what we're going to do and note that

this is all in quot quotes we're going to say aoy world I don't know if you know this or not but the the first word

the way that we used to answer the phone um was uh we'd say the phone would ring and you'd be like aoy and the other side

would go aoy Hoy so we like to do that here a lot at chulia we say aoy world it's kind of like the Holo world of this

so the body of the message the text that we're going to get uh is going to say aoy world and then we're going to send

it I'm going to send it to my phone number um so this is this is one of those numbers that you verified right

when you created your account you verified you had a number so my phone number is 432 527 4274 don't text too

late at night please um and then the final thing that we have here is this off token now this is a very private key

right we don't ever want anybody to have access this is like that Spotify token that we had right we don't ever want

anybody to have it I am going to I trust you uh and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to paste that here uh so that we

have it so um uh that is uh something that you never want to let out because now you could seeing this on my screen

you could use this right um and uh you probably don't want anybody doing that so you never want to actually give that

number out you want to hide that uh and we'll talk about how to do that uh more here in the future but right now I just

wanted to show you we're going to use Curl we are going to create we're going to send a post to this URL here and

you'll notice that ends in Json so that's what we're going to get back that's the way that that it works this

is to my account my account Sid you see it starts with this AC um and and we're going to post uh using

this data URL encode so the way that the twio API works is it takes um some parameters it takes from body and to and

the way that you pass those in curl is with this Das Das data URL encode and you pass what it is uh that you want to

have uh go across here so we're going to if all of this works I should get a message back uh I should get a text

message on my actual phone uh that says aoy world let's do and it looks like I'm missing a quote

someplace so where is the quote that I'm missing I don't see a missing [Music]

quote if I can go press the up Arrow maybe it will show up yeah oh right you know how many times I do that the aoy

world the exclamation point uh is is uh something you need to typically Escape so I'm just going to say a Hoy world

with a single quote there so if uh if you're having that problem sorry that's what that was so I pressed the up Arrow

to get my information back uh there and now if all is going well and I press s we should get a text here we go and so I

got this message back I got this and sure enough here it is I got it and you can see here it says at the front of the

body that it sent it says ay it says a scent from your Twi trial account which is fine we're in a trial account that's

totally fine but I did and boom I got it on my actual phone I got that message which is awesome we now have the ability

uh to send a text message from the command line right that's pretty cool let's take this a step further

actually so we know that uh that that API when I did a a post I was able to uh get information back I'm going to go

ahead now and I'm going to do uh just bring that back and I'm going to get rid of all of these parameters here um I'm

going to get rid of the from the body and the two and I'm going to change I'm going to make that I'm going to do a

get and let me show you what that looks like so I'm going to get rid of all of those parameters I'm going to keep that

same URL and it still has my account Sid there right in there and uh instead of a post what we're going to do is we're

going to do a get what we should do is we should get back all of the messages that are there so I'm going to hit this

kind of like a message log right so these are all the messages that have been sent uh which is awesome here it is

sent from your toio trial account so and actually I can make this look a little bit prettier like we saw with JQ again

totally optional in the notes if you want it yeah there we go so you can see that um I've got some information uh

that's sent back here and you can see that the the message that was sent it was sent outbound uh to my phone number

to me from that number uh which is awesome right and uh like I said curl is a little bit uh challenging because it's

going to be a little bit different if you're in uh Microsoft Windows or if you're in Mac I tried to make that as

comfortable as possible but you saw that I did run into a couple of things like I couldn't use the exclamation point and

things like that um it's a little clumsy so um stay tuned because there are more tools coming your way awesome job

getting that running from your local machine it feels pretty good doesn't it what a cool skill you have now you can

send a text message from your machine with just a single command now believe me this is just the tip of the iceberg

of what you can do there are so many more twio apis available and now I know that you can explore them with curl for

now though let's take things another step deeper now I don't know about you but I'm a little clumsy when it comes to

Long commands on the terminal like we just did with curl when exploring apis I really like to lean on visual tools if

you don't mind I'd love to show you some that is of course right after you take a quick

[Music] break there are a few tools that I Rely Upon when it's time for me to explore

new apis and I thought I'd share them with you I use these to dive in get my hands dirty and organize my learnings

one of the most famous tools and one that you've probably already heard of is called Postman do you get it

Postman in addition to being a pretty good Pun It's also a Powerhouse of features Postman started as a Chrome

extension that let you make API calls and what it's turned into is a powerful Enterprise ready tool with all sorts of

bells and whistles and even sharable collections for the most popular apis that are out out there it's jam-packed

full of features and in my humble opinion you probably don't need all that just yet in your Learning Journey there

are entire courses on how to properly wield its power and I've linked to a few of those in the notes there are other

tools popping up all the time that allow you to explore apis and store your notes I like to think of these apps as the

built-in the vein of Postman there's a whole genre of video games that gets dubbed Metroid Vania because they're

similar to Metroid and Castlevania now these apps are Postman post Postman esque let me show

you an example I just bought this lamp here it's rad it's from GOI and it's got this app that I can use to control it on

my phone I can change the colors right and I can even make it dance to my beatbox it also has an API these are the

docs here and as I explore these docks uh I'm going to save them in one of these Postman esque tools that I've been

using lately called rest Fox like here I can see all of the devices that are associated with my GOI

account and I set that up using this URL here and you'll see that it is a get request and I pressed send and it sent

the request and I got back uh the goie devices that are associated with my account this API requires a header and

it's called goie API key and you'll see these double mustaches here that I'm using this side little mustache thing uh

this is getting things from my environment as a special key that I don't want anybody to see I'll show you

more of those here in a bit now notice how this is a get so I can send the request and you'll see that here's my

response and I can also get the current state so I have a different call here I can get the current state and note that

uh if I click Send here we can see that this is the color of my light currently and I can also uh turn it on or turn it

off and I can turn it on and I can also change the color right so I'm going to turn this to to Red you

don't have to turn the red light on roxan pretty cool right and I have this here for me whenever I want to tweak

things when I want to come back later and when I want to use it in my code did you just have a light bulb moment I

quite literally just did let's see if we can't build one of these for the twilio apis so if you'd like to get rest Fox

installed please uh check the notes this is an open source tool and it's getting better every day now if you love it too

I highly suggest that you start it if you click up here you could go and you can actually check out the GitHub repo

uh and you could see cute little fox here and you'll see over here how it's tagged oh it's tagged rest client I

guess maybe that's a little bit better than my Metroid Vania analogy uh maybe rest client is a good thing API client

that's also a good thing so there's lots of these tools uh that are available but let's start using this one so I've got

rest fox running here and you'll see I've got the goie folder which I can collapse

and typically what I do is group these by the API that I'm exploring so let's keep poking around a little bit with

twilio so uh what I'll do is I'll make a new folder called twilio so I'm going to right click over here and make a new

folder called twilio and now in here we'll create a new request so I right clicked new

request and I'd love to explore more of the SMS API so let's see uh oh you know what this new number that we just bought

this twilio number that we bought not not only can It send messages but it can also receive them so we could send it a

message so let's do that so let's go ahead and send a text to your number now if you forgot your number it's uh over

in your console so if you come to your console and you scroll down a little bit here you'll see my twilio number so go

ahead and send uh a text to your number now my number I'm going to send a number it's 561 81654 33 I'm going to send it

yo and uh uh there we go it went and I ended up getting a default message back um and we could change this we can make

we could program this to do whatever uh but I'll show that off later but for now uh I just want you to know that we

created a new message uh by sending to this this API and we can actually get it um and you can also find your phone

number later here under this phone numbers if you go to phone numbers manage active numbers uh you can see

your phone number and remember outside of trial mode you could buy multiple numbers so that's an important uh thing

to know here so all right so we're going to look at the incoming messages so uh we should do

that we should call the request what it's going to be we'll call this incoming message log that sounds good

and we'll click create okay so let's head over to the docs and see how we might do this with

so back in the docs here on the message resource remember this is where we did the create a message I'm going to see if

there's something else down in here ah list all messages that's a good one but we don't want all of the messages we

actually want to filter it a little bit so look here we can do this by by matching filter criteria that's great so

we're in here I'm under the curl tab right I could be in these different ones but this this is the example that we

want here I'm going to grab this URL you're going to see all of this that's how they're filtering there's some stuff

here at the end I'm going to grab all of this and I'm going to copy it I'm gonna come back over and I am going to uh

paste it here in this enter request URL I'm going to paste the whole thing there and it was a get request and uh the URL

had some stuff in this query string that came afterwards and a query string uh is you know defined by this question mark

so we don't want this date sent let's get rid of this and what's next we don't we don't want from right we don't we

want to look at all the numbers that were was sent to right so this is the two here is what we want

now this 2B here just happens to be a uh percent 2B URL and Coda happens to be a plus and I know that and I just happen

to know that without having to Google it but that's that's a little rough to know like how do I make a plus sign in in

here um wouldn't it be nice if this tool just did all of this URL encoding for us like we didn't need to make this mess at

the end well check this out here's query right here this is what we want so we want to add this query we don't want to

have this whole stuff at the end here we want to put in uh two we're going to add uh one of those things there we'll put

in a two so that's going to append that query string for me and I'm going to put in uh uh the to my phone number which

again my willo phone number uh which is over here in my

logs uh right here actually I can I'm going to grab this number this is my my twilio number I'm going to put it in the

format uh that is wanted there my rest Fox here we go so I'm gon to that and we're going to get rid of make sure

that's 1561 there we go got rid of all those all right now also remember that this was

accounts and then it had account Sid right so that's the the ID for my account and then it's under messages

there's a collection called messages underneath this count Sid but what we want here is we want that was uh using

an environment variable from curl um but this is also known as a path variable right a path parameter so here down here

we have this path parameters so the way that these work actually uh to to replace them is if we go like this if I

get rid of this and I put a Col in what's going to happen is we can anything that's down here in this path

parameter will replace what's here so let's do that let's add this item and again that is twilio account Sid so

that's the name of the the the variable that's up here right is col and twio account Sid that was just what's there

let's keep it because that's what it is and then we're going to put our account Sid there so that also is on my console

so I'm going to flip back uh to my console and uh on the the main page here you come in uh you can come down and you

can grab your account Sid so now I have my account S and I'm going to paste that there awesome and I think we're ready

I'm going to press send and uhoh we got an error we got a 401 unauthorized no credentials provided oh that's right of

course we want to log in we don't want anyone just being able to see uh these messages so we want to make sure that we

have some authentication happening so I'm going to head over to the off tab you'll see that if I slide

this back and forth I don't know how much screen real estate you have but you can you can slide these kind of around

as need be uh so I can I'm going to pull this and you'll see that when I do my my little menu here uh collapses uh so uh

I'm going to choose off from here but that that is also available in uh the header here right so like it's just a

different view of it all right so in the off I'm going to put in a basic off and I'm going to put

in a username which is my username and then I'm also going to put in uh my password which is my off token

over here and again this is very private and you would never ever want to do this uh you now know my off token I don't

want you to have that um uh because uh you could do exactly anything you wanted to to my account now that we're there

and one of the things that you could do is see the messages that were sent in and look there's my yo my yo message has

made it in um awesome so uh also I wanted to show you the request that happened let's take a look at that you

can see that what actually happened was it was a get that was sent with the account Sid right and so that was the

account Sid that we used from if we look back at the query parameters here the account Sid uh showed up there and then

uh it automatically did a two URL encoded and if you look it put the question mark in for us and it did that

percent 2B for us automatically URL encoded very nice right and we can see the headers that

were sent and we can also take a look let's look again at this preview so we see that we had a the the response came

back and this is Json right so we have a key called messages and this messages has this uh it starts out there could be

multiple messages here right so this is a the start of what's known as a list or an array and then there's an object and

the start of the object is always done with one of these mustaches and we call those mustaches because if you kind of

turn your head sideways it it looks like a mustache so uh all between the opening mustache and the closing mustache uh is

the information about um the mesages right so here's the and there's the closing uh bit of my list there's only

one this is the closing mustache there and uh so part of the message that we could see we could see who uh it was

to that's that's my twio phone number here and we could see the from there's my phone number there please don't call

too late but that's my my phone number uh and I did say I said yo to it which is awesome so now we have this now this

step is completely optional this is something that I like to do uh is I like to take notes all right so there's this