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We've been using the requests module for a while now,
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and we've been using it to make HTTP requests across the internet.
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We've already seen the get request,
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and this is a way for us to get pieces of data from somebody else,
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like an API provider.
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Now there's also four other common types of requests that we should probably know
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about; post put and delete.
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We can use the request module to complete a get request by simply writing
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requests.get
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and then we put our parameters inside the parentheses. For the other three
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requests,
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the code looks pretty much the same. It's .post, .put, and .delete.
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Whereas a get request is made where we ask an external system for a
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particular piece of data and they give that to us in the response.
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a post request is where we give the external system some piece of data
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and we're not so interested in the response we're getting back other than
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whether if it was successful or not. For example,
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if you wanted to save a piece of data in Google sheets,
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then you might use the Google sheets API
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to you post your data into your Google sheet.
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Or maybe you want to use the Twitter API to post a tweet
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then your program is going to send your tweet through a post request to the
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Twitter API. So that's how get
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and post works. Put is where you simply update a piece of data in the
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external service. So if you had a spreadsheet in Google sheets
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and maybe you want to update some of the values in the spreadsheet,
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then you would use a put request.
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And finally delete is simply where you want to delete a piece of data in the
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external service
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like a tweet that you posted or a Facebook post. Today
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we're going to be building our habit tracker using the Pixela API.
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And in order to use this API,
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we're going to post our habit tracking data, for example,
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how many pages have a book we've read, how many kilometers we've cycled,
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and we're going to be posting that data to Pixela
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to be tracked in our graph.
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If you head over to their website and you scroll down,
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you can see that it tells you how to get started.
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And it's a series of six steps.
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So we're going to be completing these in order
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and we're going to be pairing this short form
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get started guide with their documentation.
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So we're going to have that side by side in order to see all of the
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documentation on each of the steps. Step one
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involves creating a user account. And it says you have to hit up this particular
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end point using the HTTP post request.
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So this is the first time we're making a post request.
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Now I've set up a new project in PyCharm habit tracker
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and in my main.py, as always, that I'm going to start off by importing the
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requests module. Now,
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because this is a brand new project we're going to have to install that package
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to make this red underline go away.
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And once it's been installed successfully, we can tap into that method requests
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.post. What are we going to
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put into this parentheses, what are the parameters, what are the inputs?
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Well, the first thing is the URL endpoint, right?
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So this is the Pixela endpoint,
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and that is going to be all of this.
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Let's copy that over and paste it in as a string.
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Now, if we head over to the API document,
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you can see that there's an index of the API on the right,
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and also at the beginning of the docs.
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So what we want to do is first create a user,
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That's step one.
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Now, this API is actually really well-documented,
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especially given the fact that it's actually not a big development team behind
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this. If we take a look, this is the end point,
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and this is what we've got in our code. Next,
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we're going to make our post request
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and we're going to add some parameters into the request body.
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So you can see that some of these are required and others are optional.
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So we're going to add a value for each of the required parameters;
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token, username, agreedTermsOfService, and that we're not a minor.
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Cool.
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So let's create our user_params. And the first key is our token.
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Now let's see what this token needs to be.
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It has to be a string that's used to authenticate your user
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and we're going to use it later on as well when we access our graph
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and when we add to it. So make sure you save this securely.
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This is basically like an API key that you're going to generate yourself.
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This token can contain any characters,
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so you can make up a key like this,
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but the length of the token has to be between 8 characters and 128
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characters. So I think I've definitely got more than eight characters there,
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so I can move on to the next key, which is my username.
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I'm going to try and see if I can get away with just my first name. If it fails,
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we can always try it again. Next,
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we've got agreeTermsOfService and this is going to be either yes or no.
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We're probably going to have to say yes
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if we actually want to use this service.
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And also we're going to have to say yes that we're not a minor.
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Let's make sure that we don't make any typos by simply pasting this in.
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So it's a yes for agreed to terms of service and a yes
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to the fact that I'm not a minor, sadly. Not a minor anymore.
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Once we've got our user parameters and our Pixela endpoint,
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then we're ready to make our post request. Again,
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we're going to start off with the URL which is going to be our Pixela endpoint,
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and then we're going to add a new keyword argument.
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And this is called json.
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Notice how all the data that we're posting over to Pixela is pretty much in
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the format of a JSON. String and string.
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This is basically a piece of JSON data that we're going to send over.
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And that's all there is to it. The endpoint
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and also the JSON data that we want to send over.
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So let's go ahead and save this inside a response variable just as we did
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before. And then once this is completed,
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let's go ahead and print what the response is.
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Now you can either tap into the response as a JSON,
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but given that in this case we're not really looking to do anything with the
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response. We just wanna check if it's actually successful or not.
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We can actually tap into a property called text.
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So it'll give you back the response as a piece of text.
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Let's go ahead and run this and see if I can get away with setting my username
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as angela. Wow.
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So there's actually no user called angela at the moment
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and I was able to nab that username.
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So the reason why we're interested in looking at the response is
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if there were some issues, for example, if I tried to run this again
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now that I've taken this username, I think it's probably going to fail
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and it tells us this user already exists. Now, alternatively, if we said
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no to one of these, agreed to terms of service or not minor,
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it's probably also going to give us a message telling us why this post request
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failed. But now that I've completed this step,
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I can actually comment it out because I've now created my user.
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We've now set up ourselves with a new account on Pixela with a username and also
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a secret token that we're gonna use in the future to access this account.
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It's effectively our user name and password. So in the next lesson
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we're going to create our graph and we're going to learn how to use a more
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secure method of authentication.
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So for all of that and more, I'll see you on the next lesson.