I’m looking for examples of calls to the Lemmy API… I’ve been to the following link in the documentation:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/04-api.html

However I don’t see any direct examples of uses of the API for common cases, like creating a post, creating a comment or getting either type of item. Some of the linked documentation from that page points to what I believe is typescript code for interfaces, but that does not really have examples of actually calling those interfaces. I can make some logical guesses at to what the calls should be, but I don’t have a way to really verify this yet.

Does anyone have some working examples they can post?

  • Okay, before I head off to bed, I think this works for the login and authentication token:

    import requests
    import json
    
    def login(username_or_email, password):
        # Define the URL for the login endpoint
        url = "https://lemmy.ml/api/v1/user/login"
    
        # Define the headers for the request
        headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
    
        # Define the data for the login
        data = {
         "username_or_email": username_or_email,
         "password": password
        }
    
        # Send the POST request
        response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(data))
    
        # Extract the JWT from the response
        jwt = response.json().get('jwt')
    
        return jwt
    
    # Use the login function
    jwt = login("your_username_or_email", "your_password")
    print(jwt)
    

    The JSON Web Token (jwt) should contain the authentication token. At least I think that’s the case. I picked this out by reading through the Go code at the following URL: https://github.com/Elara6331/go-lemmy/blob/master/lemmy.go

    I’ll play around with the code later.

    • Sorry for the late response to my other comment - I also was reading through the documentation for the first time and it looks like you got the answer ahead of me, nice!

      I whipped up some sample code that does exactly the same thing you ended up doing, so no further additions here except that in the Lemmy API is expecting requests to be sent to <instance domain>/api/v3/... .

      I used my code that is basically the same to what you have above here, but when I switched it to v1 the server throws an 400 error (malformed request). So if you haven’t ran this code already you’ve got my sanity check that it will work except for making sure you change the api version. You can then carry that auth token with you when making requests by including it in the header like so

      headers = {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json'
        'auth': '<jwt goes here>'
      }
      
      • Thanks, I’ll revamp my code when I start testing it later. I think eventually I’ll put together a python library for interacting with Lemmy, or at least give enough of an example that someone else can get a good start.

  • Here’s a kind of guess on how to create a post using python’s requests library:

    import requests
    import json
    
    # Define the URL for the API endpoint
    url = "https://lemmy.ml/api/v1/post"
    
    # Define the headers for the request
    headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
    
    # Define the data for the new post
    data = {
     "name": "Your Post Title",
     "community_id": 123,  # Replace with your community ID
     "url": "https://your-url.com",  # Optional
     "body": "Your post content",  # Optional
     "nsfw": False,  # Optional
     "language_id": 1,  # Optional, replace with your language ID
     "auth": "your_auth_token_here"
    }
    
    # Send the POST request
    response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(data))
    
    # Print the response
    print(response.json())
    

    Does this look right? I understand that I’ll have to authenticate to the server to do this, but I’m really not sure how to do that.

  • Here’s another example, this time for creating a comment:

    import requests
    import json
    
    # Define the URL for the API endpoint
    url = "https://lemmy.ml/api/v1/comment"
    
    # Define the headers for the request
    headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
    
    # Define the data for the new comment
    data = {
     "content": "Your comment content",
     "post_id": 123,  # Replace with the ID of the post you're commenting on
     "form_id": "your_form_id",  # Replace with your form ID
     "auth": "your_auth_token_here"
    }
    
    # Send the POST request
    response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(data))
    
    # Print the response
    print(response.json())
    

    Does anyone know how to do the login process in Lemmy, and retrieve an auth token?