flapi.sh: a tiny command-line tool for experimenting with the Flickr API

Posted 11 April 2024
Tagged with flickr
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I use the Flickr API pretty much every day in my day job. Within the first week, I bashed together a couple of command-line tools to make a simple tool for exploring the API. They’re not meant for building “proper” apps, more for quick experiments and seeing what API responses look like.

The main tool is flapi, and you pass it two arguments: the name of the API method, and (optionally) any query parameters you want to include. Then it calls the Flickr API for you!

For example:

$ flapi flickr.photos.getInfo photo_id=25260341744
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rsp stat="ok">
  <photo id="25260341744" secret="3e30df4a20" server="1645" farm="2" dateuploaded="1458345230" isfavorite="0" license="7" safety_level="0" rotation="0" originalsecret="b473e4a3b0" originalformat="jpg" views="83654" media="photo">
    …

There are lots of ways to play with APIs – colleagues at a previous job used Postman, and Flickr itself has an API Explorer where you can try requests in the browser. I like doing it with a command-line tool because I always have lots of terminal windows open, and it’s easy to grab one and check something with flapi.

Today I finally took the time to tidy up the script and post it on GitHub.

The code isn’t complicated – indeed, it was easy to cobble it together from a bunch of other tools. Even if you have no interest in the Flickr API, some of them might be useful for you.

I’m using keyring to store and retrieve my Flickr API key in the macOS Keychain. This is a Python library that makes it easy to manage passwords and other secrets, and to avoid hard-coding secrets in my code.
I use curl to make the actual HTTP request. I recently listened to an interesting interview with Daniel Stenberg, curl’s creator and maintainer, where he talked about how curl got started and how he keeps it going.
I pipe the output to xmllint --format, which pretty-prints the XML. I’m not sure how much of a difference it makes to Flickr’s API responses, but it’s nice to remember that macOS has a built in reformatter for XML.
Finally, I pipe the reformatted XML to Pygments to add syntax highlighting. For me, this makes the output a bit easier to read.

Put together, the core logic of flapi is just four lines:

api_key=$(keyring get flickr_api key)

curl --silent "https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?api_key=${api_key}&method=${method}&${params}" \
  | xmllint --format - \
  | pygmentize -l xml

These four programs feel like an exemplar of the Unix Way: small tools that each do one task well, written so they can be combined in complex ways.