HW09: Working with APIs due Sat 28 Oct 23:59
Overview
In this assignment you will work with at least two separate APIs. First, choose an API that provides fun/interesting information and experiment with it in your browser. There are many sites that list available APIs such as: https://medium.com/@vicbergquist/18-fun-apis-for-your-next-project-8008841c7be9The goal is to create a script that will grab some random fact/entry/info/something and automatically create a blog post from it. Then it will use the Wordpress API to generate the blog post.
When completed the script should be placed in the /etc/cron.daily directory
so it will generate a new blog post each day.
Some Details
To create a new post in the Wordpress API from the command-line you'll need to establish an authentication method. Wordpress' out-of-the-box authentication is pretty limited so I ended up using miniOrange Wordpress REST API Authentication plugin.I used JWT Authentication and entered a random client secret string. I copied the provided curl command to generate a new token. The resulting token is good for 1 hour (so the command to generate a new token will need to appear in the script—eventually). The generated token is used for subsequent API calls. For example, to see a list of posts you would do this:
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer the-long-token" \ https://blog.yourdomain/wp-json/wp/v2/posts
These are some details to keep in mind as you work on this.
- The official Wordpress REST API Handbook is here:
- You should (manually) create a category which will apply to all blog posts generated by your script.
- Also, be sure to specify an author, a title, and content for all blog posts.
- To generate a POST request using curl you can do something like this:
curl -H "authentication-info" -d "param1=x¶m2=y" -X POST url