APIs

Overview

Today we will use our express server to request information from third party APIs to send to the front-end.

Class Outline

• Warm-up exercise
• Review code challenges
• Introduction of today's code challenge topic
• Code review of lab assignment
• Requesting data from 3rd party APIs via the server
• Code Demo
• Lab Preview

Learning Objectives

Students will be able to

Describe and Define

• APIs

Execute

• Node Express Server
• Use axios to fetch remote data asynchronously
• Use axios to reach out to the back-end from the front-end
• Ingest 3rd Party data from an API
• Integrate data with a separate web application

Notes

1. What is an API?

2. Why do we need a server?

3. What do we keep in our .env file?

4. Nodemon will automatically detect changes that we make to all the files in our server, however, if we make a change to THIS file, we must restart nodemon for it to take affect.

5. True or False: all API's require a key

6. To make an API call in the server using axios:

const url = `http://urlToAPI/?key=${process.env.MY_API_KEY}&city=seattle`;

// notice the 'await'. This is asynchronous code. The function will need to be 'async'
const axiosResults = await axios.get(url);
console.log(axiosResults.data);

• NOTE: axios returns a giant object. The data we care about will be found in the data property of that object.