How to use the dev.to API!

Why?

I use dev.to as my main dev blogging area now, but I want to show-off my blogs on my portfolio! So we're going to create a simple list of the latest 3 blog articles which link back to the dev.to site. For this tutorial I'll be showing how this can be achieved in PHP.

Let's go!

First of all, the below is a great starting point to understand the dev.to API and all of the possible endpoints.

The state of dev.to v0 api

Alfredo Salzillo ・ Mar 25 '19 ・ 1 min read

#api #devto #discuss #rest

We're going to be using this endpoint: https://dev.to/api/articles?username=nataliedeweerd which generates a JSON object with the author's latest 30 articles. To get your personal endpoint, change the nataliedeweerd username to your own.

So how do we get this data into our website? In PHP we can use something called cURL. cURL (client URL) is a PHP library which allows you to make HTTP requests. So you can call a URL in your code and get a HTML response from it.

The below code shows a basic curl function which gets us our data:

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
  CURLOPT_URL => "https://dev.to/api/articles?username=nataliedeweerd",
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
  CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
  CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => "GET",
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
    "cache-control: no-cache"
  ),
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);
$err = curl_error($curl);

curl_close($curl);

We need to decode this data before we can effectively use it however.

$response = json_decode($response, true); 

This decodes the json object into a much more usable array! All we need to do now is loop through the array, and print out the results.

foreach ($response as $key => $article){

    echo '
        <a href="'.$article['url'].'" class="blog__article">
            <h2>'.$article['title'].'</h2>
            <div class="blog__description">'.$article['description'].'</div>
            <div class="blog__readmore">Read More</div>
        </a>
    ';

    if ($key == 2){ break; }

}

Because the array key's are numeric, we can use these to determine how many articles we've printed. If we've printed 3 articles the key will be 2 (array's start from 0 don't forget), so we break out of the foreach.

If you want to have a closer look at what keys the array is printing out, you can use the below code before the foreach loop:

echo '<pre>'.print_r($response,true).'</pre>';

This will show you everything the decoded JSON is returning, allowing you to include your article's images, or canonical links, or tags!

And that's it! We just need to apply a bit of CSS and our dev.to articles are printing out wherever we want!

Let me know if you have any more questions below.

Comments

[𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝]

If it's only 1 specific article you want to extract, you can use https://dev.to/api/articles/148356, and replace 148356 with the unique post ID. You can then access the title and url keys.

Still trying to find the easiest way to obtain the unique post ID... however you can use this endpoint https://dev.to/api/articles?username=nataliedeweerd and look for the "id" key to find the unique post's ID.

See here for more info docs.forem.com/api/#operation/getU...

Hope that helps somewhat... if not, let me know what you're trying to achieve and I'll help further :)

[Sony AK]

nice, but how to get the markdown content of each article? any endpoint for that?

Update:
Oh ignore my question above, finally found the answer at dev.to/api

[𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝]

Good job finding the answer! 👍

[Oscar Ortiz]

Does anyone know how to get this to work with ReactJS?

I am currently stuck on the the request preflight section where I am getting blocked by CORS.

I have not been able to find anything online to help me solve this issue and I would really love to be able to use my API key freely.

Hope someone can help.

[Deco]

dev.to/jrsofty/cors-problem-workar...

[Matvey Romanov]

Is it possible to get only 2 latest posts?

[𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝]

Absolutely!

Arrays start from 0, meaning if you want the latest 2, you want to stop when the array key (the index of the array item) reaches 1. So you have 0, and 1. The API automatically orders by newest first, so we just need to tell it when to stop!

In the code above, simply change if ($key == 2){ break; } to if ($key == 1){ break; }

Hope that helps :) but let me know if you have anymore questions, or it doesn't make sense.

[Grant Riordan]

do we know how we can view the documentation for this API, in terms of query params and such. I'd like to filter out any article which has been archived, or is in Draft format. As when i hit the api, it seems it is returning archived posts aswell.

[Amrin]

you can easily do that with this.
const latest2Post = postArray.slice(0, 2);

[Matvey Romanov]

Really useful article

[𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝]

Glad you found it helpful! :)

[lpatipat]

Been looking to jumpstart blogging as a developer! This might be really cool to integrate into my portfolio as well. Thanks a bunch :)

[Rudra Pratap]

Is this API limited to only latest 30 blogs? If yes, how to fetch all of them?

[StevenMODIMO]

Thank you and very helpful. But what if i want to fetch comments from article(s) and get a response with their comments and images so i can display them. Help please.

[Gokay Buruc]

Thanks for inspiration. Generally i saw the post using Postman with other programming languages but first time i see the usage of curl instead of Postman to check HTTP Methods.

[Mahdi Ruiz]

nice post