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To practice front end development, we often need to practice making HTTP requests to APIs. To do this easily, we can use APIs that are already built so we can focus on front-end development instead of writing our own APIs to practice with.
We'll look at some free APIs you can use to practice.
Dog API
The Dog API is free and it provides us with endpoints for dog pictures and text data. It supports CORS so that we can use it directly from our front end apps.
Petfinder
This API provides us with pet adoption data. It requires OAuth for authentication in order to access the data. This API also supports CORS so we can use it from the front end.
shibe.online
shibe.online gives us URLs for cute dog pictures as data. It takes query strings that's used to query the API for data.
Anime News Network API
If you like Anime, then this API is for you. It returns data in various formats like HTML or XML. Therefore, you'll have to convert to JSON from XML if you need to manipulate and display the data.
Jikan
This is another anime data API. It's the unofficial API for MyAnimeList. There's a REST API that supports CORS in addition to libraries made for various platforms like Python, Ruby, and JavaScript.
JSONPlaceholder
This provides an API with GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests and it supports CORS. The endpoints that it provides has preloaded data that we can use to display and also to update them.
REQ | RES
Like JSONPlaceholder, this provides a real API for you to build front-ends on. It has endpoints for all HTTP actions which are used for getting and manipulating fake user data. There's already data prepopulated so that you don't have to add them yourself.
Conclusion
To focus on front end development practice, you can use these APIs to develop your practice front end app. Now you can worry about back end development later.
Top comments (24)
Any api is a very good one as it compiles information of a lot of open api
any-api.com/
I think you could include NASA API it has a lot of data and information available to the public:
api.nasa.gov/
Open Weather is also a good one:
openweathermap.org/api
For any Anime Fan I would recommend:
animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/...
This is a good one as it lets you get movie like information, covers, actors, and more.
Last but not least the must have of all APIs
pokeapi.co/
NASA's API is pretty high quality. Lots of photos URLs, data for near-earth objects, etc.
Open Weather API also a good free weather API to practice with.
The other ones are also good finds.
If you need to design an API, for example, create custom methods, generate and save some data on the server I can recommend fake.rest
It's a project-based service, with a variety of settings for HTTP response.
That looks good. I see that it can seed data according to the docs, which makes it even better.
Creating data by hand is awful.
Thanks.
Yes, the data can be seeded in Store Arrays and used in CRUD operations or could be regenerated dynamically for each response if required.
Dog CEO is the best.
Here are some other fun APIs I found recently.
Thanks. These are good for practice.
One tool I have been using is crudpi.io/
It lets you create a standalone CRUD API. I like this in particular because it lets you format your JSON return however you want it, and it also includes some auto-values to give you sample data (Random First and Last names for example).
Good read!
Thanks. Your site looks good. If it has auth built-in, then it's even better.
For those developing news apps (like I did) this list of news apis offers many free apis.
These are good. I would also add the New York Times API to the list.
Any of them give full content for free?
I don't think anyone gives full content for free.
Cool recommendations 👍😊
Thanks
I'm rather fond of the US National Parks one. There's tons of information per park, including alerts, which are frequently updated and sometimes contain warnings about bears. Win win.
Thanks. I didn't know that existed
pokeapi.co/
Pokemon API is one of my favorites :D
It's good. It has lots of endpoints and data you can display.
One more who wants to create pdf using api html2pdf.app
jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/
also good fake API
Petfinder bans every new registered account from API calls after few minutes. Not very convenient.
Hmm..is there husky api or shiba inu apis?
Yep. shibe.online
You can check mine also for sample data api