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If you want to practice front end development without building your own back end API, you have lots of choices. Here are some APIs that are free and easy to use, so that you don't have to waste time writing your own fake API to practice with.
Random Dogs
The Random Dogs API just has one endpoint that returns a URL for a dog image. You can use this to practice writing simple apps if you're a complete newbie.
Random Cats
Like the Random Dogs API, the Random Cats API returns a URL for a cat image.
Behance
The Behance API returns projects from the Behance website. Authentication is done with a free API key.
You can use it to search for projects, get users and comments for each project, and get collections.
It's a good API to practice using query strings and parameters since some endpoints use those to query for data.
Rijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum API lets us search for art that has been uploaded to the Rijksmuseum database. To use it, you just have to sign up for an API key.
The API is free and it provides data for various art pieces in their collection, including artist, title, language, date, format, and more.
ClearBit Logo API
This API lets us get business logos for free. You can make 600 requests a minute with this API, which should be plenty of requests for a practice app. The Logo API is free.
It also has lots of data on companies, data for people that are associated with an email address, calculate risks of chargebacks for particular payments, endpoints for deanonymizing IP addresses by retrieving data via an IP address, and more. These APIs are paid as opposed to the logo API.
Conclusion
These are very useful APIs for practicing with since they're free and easy to use. Now you don't have to think hard and take time to make your own back end to practice front end development
Top comments (11)
Thanks for sharing. For those interested, Todd Motto has a huge collection of free public APIs he gathered together in a GitHub repository.
Yea. That's a great resource.
Nice post! You can also check out the shrtco.de API. I built this URL Shortner API with simplicity in mind. It should be perfect, especially for beginners, to experiment with APIs! No authentication required! I'm very open to feedback & questions :)
That's great. It's useful and it's good for practice.
Glad you like it! :)
Great post. swapi.co/ is my usual go to, but I'm happy to have some more options!
More is better for practice. That's for sure.
Thanks John! always know I can get good content from your posts 😁
Thanks for reading. People like you encourage me to keep posting here.
Awesome post!
Just a quick heads up that I believe there was a minor MD mistake on that final heading causing the link to be a little wacky.
p.s. Feel free to hide this comment if you fix it. 🙂👍
Thanks for reading!
Yes, I fixed the typo.