Implement at least some basic form of API.

[zorbathut]

We have need of at least one bot (PaperclipPerfector) that is, at this time, easier to port to an API than it is to reimplement within tildes. So provide a basic API. This can be as simple as config-file-provided keys that enable the API.

[Deimos]

If you want to work on adding a "real" API, the Cornice library is installed with some minimal configuration, but currently disabled: https://cornice.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

For example, here's an endpoint via Cornice for displaying user info: https://github.com/themotte/tildes/blob/master/tildes/tildes/views/api/v0/user.py

You'd need to re-enable it by uncommenting this line, but it's not safe to just do that since it will make some private data available through the API: https://github.com/themotte/tildes/blob/master/tildes/tildes/api.py#L32

But there's a very minimal base there if you want to look into going that direction. However, HTTP works as a pretty good API, so it's probably going to be a lot easier to just have the bot send HTTP requests. Someone even made a little Python library that can make that easier, and it's been used to make a few simple Tildes bots: https://gitlab.com/deing/tildee

[zorbathut]

I'm worried about the HTML approach since I suspect we'll be making HTML changes in a bunch of places; maybe not anything that would break a well-written tag scraper, but maybe something that would. I kind of like the idea of just providing a ?json=1 parameter to everything.

Cornice seems like the right solution, but yeah, it'll take some tinkering to make sure we're not exposing internal stuff.

On the flip side, it may just not be worth worrying about all this right now; maybe the right answer to "do you have an API" is "no, but here's the beginning of one, want to provide a pull request?"

Thanks for the pointer in the right direction!