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Show HN: SWAPI – A Star Wars API
- ianakelly 12y agoI Virtualized this API just for kicks - https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/planets/7 https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/planets/... and https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/vehicles/1 https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/vehicles... Would love more details and I can make a Virtual Copy of the whole thing. Built it here https://vapi.ca.com https://vapi.ca.com
- ianakelly 12y agoAdded Films and People now https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/films/6 https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/films/6 https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/people/1 https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/people/1
- acomjean 12y agoTotally ridiculous, but awesome at the same time. Make that API great! Whats the backend?
- paulhallett 12y agoHey! Thanks. I made the Pokémon API as well - http://pokeapi.co http://pokeapi.co The backend on that is Django. I might stick with what I know, or build SWAPI in Go. At the moment, we're still very early stage, so we can choose soon.
- anonfunction 12y agoI was so excited and then equally let down when I realized it wasn't online and this is just a coming soon page. Oh well, I signed up.
- paulhallett 12y agoWe're working on it, sorry!
- anonfunction 12y agoNo worries and thanks for building it. You may want to put the email capture above so it's more clear as I'm probably not the only one to copy pasta the url in the examples and be confused for a moment until scrolling to the bottom.
- paulhallett 12y agoGood point. I set the URL config to catch all URLs and redirect back to the home page (anticipating people would try the API). Once things die down I'll push up an update. Getting a heavy bit of traffic right now.
- ukmadlz 12y agoThis is amazing, all I need is a reason to mash http://pokeapi.co http://pokeapi.co into this
- paulhallett 12y agoHi Mike, this is Paul, I am making this API too :D
- ukmadlz 12y agoYeah I know, I'be even used PokeAPI at a hack before. It's MusicHackDay soon, I may have to use it again as a reference for poke chiptunes
- paulhallett 12y agoPlease do :D
- gegtik 12y agoLuke Sykwalker
- paulhallett 12y agoGood spot!
- SvenAndersson 12y agoHah! I'm in need of just this sort of API come January, what are the odds? Awesome, hope you launch soon!
- paulhallett 12y agoETA is end of January :)
- mcphage 12y agoCan I use the API to figure out that, for instance, the x-wing is /vehicles/1 and Mustafar is /planets/7? Otherwise, how would I know?
- paulhallett 12y agoAs well as ID, we'll do some fuzzy matching on the URLs as well, so GET /api/vehicle/t-65-x-wing and GET /api/planets/mustafar will also work
- lttlrck 12y agoThis doesn't work on pokeapi.co
- paulhallett 12y agoPokeAPI is getting an update - http://phalt.co/if-you-have-data-they-will-consume-it/ http://phalt.co/if-you-have-data-they-will-consume-it/ and it will have better fuzzy matching.
- anonfunction 12y agoI think it would be nice to also provide an endpoint that lists all the resources as an array of objects where the key is the id and the value is the name. Maybe something like this: GET /resources/ships [ { 1 : "Tantive IV" }, ]
- paulhallett 12y agoSo RESTfully, I think this is normal. You should be able to call a resource and then be fed back all of those resources (usually paginated to say, 20 per request). It will have this style of lookup.
- svsaraf 12y agoDo you mind discussing how you did the fuzzy matching? My initial guess would've been dynamic programming (levenstein distance), but if this is API-wide, did you make a suffix tree?
- Adrock 12y agoCheck out the author's blog post where he explains his motivation: http://phalt.co/if-you-have-data-they-will-consume-it/ http://phalt.co/if-you-have-data-they-will-consume-it/
- kcbanner 12y agoAny reason why this is an API and not a data dump?
- paulhallett 12y agoI guess the main reason is that data dumps are sometimes hard to sift through, can become inconsistent (if there are multiple copies) and because from my experience, if you provide an API for something, someone will use it. On the flip side: I've found that often people have always asked "why isn't there an API for that?" And of course, you can easily get a data dump from this by just cURLing all the resources and storing them :)
- antihero 12y agoYou don't really want to have to download potentially gigabytes of data to find a few sets of results!
- paulhallett 12y agoLocal caching will be the way to go. All resources will have a "date_updated" or similar attribute which you can check against.
- slapresta 12y agoAhh, if only HTTP had defined a standard header for checking if the requested content has been modified, and sending a specific status code if that's the case...
- TD-Linux 12y ago"potentially gigabytes of data" is now a microSD card smaller than my thumbnail, or alternately the cheapest instance on AWS.
- emillon 12y agoUnder which license is this data available?
- paulhallett 12y agoThe data is being scraped from sources online and by watching the films about a thousand times. As the data is already available freely elsewhere, I won't be charging or keeping the data, I'll provide it just like I do on http://pokeapi.co http://pokeapi.co
- rakoo 12y agoThank you for what you're doing, that's awesome! I'd like to enlighten why choosing a license is important. Many people can be picky about the license, because even though you may be full of good intentions, the data you provide is non-free as-is in that it can't be reused elsewhere. Having a license is the clean, boring way to tell everyone "do whatever you want with this data". That's even a problem for Github, or more precisely Github users, because many people push some code without any explicit license, making this code hardly usable by default: it may be available but you don't know if you have the right to reuse it, even if the developer said "yeah, use this as you want". That's not enough. Just because the developer didn't take a few minutes to select and put a LICENSE file. It is also important to think about it in the other direction: If you're going to take content from Wookieepedia, their license is CC-BY-SA (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Wookieepedia:Copyrights http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Wookieepedia:Copyrights), which means that you MUST say it comes (at least partially) from them (not that you wouldn't anyway) and that you MUST redistribute your content with a "similar" license. Even though you may think that everything is fine, there are some actions to do on this side. Now, I'd understand that if only "amateurs" come and play with the data, we're all among good behaving adults and all is fine. But you may not be able to predict what will happen with how data is used, so unfortunately this step is important. Personally I don't like restricting people, so I try to use CC0 as much as possible. Be aware that Creative Commons licenses may not be best suited for data (they were designed for work of art primarily), as can be seen by OSM's decision on the matter (http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/We_Are_Changing_The_License http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/We_Are_Changing_Th...) so you may want to avoid them. Note: I'm not even talking about money, which is an orthogonal problem.
- 1kevgriff 12y agoSigned up. This is going to be great for conference demos.
- paulhallett 12y ago:D My other API for Pokémon is also great for demos and teaching APIs - http://pokeapi.co http://pokeapi.co
- reubenswartz 12y agoNot encouraging to see a basic error right on the front page: "From all six Star Wars films" Couldn't resist... ;-)
- paulhallett 12y agoCheck the bottom of the page ;) We'll have episode VII details as and when it gets released.
- simonsayscode 12y agoI'm pretty sure it was a jibe at the fact that only 3 real Star Wars live-action films were made.
- paulhallett 12y agoAh, you didn't see the film_id & episode_id reference in the second example?
- joshdotsmith 12y agoI feel like somewhere, somehow, a point is being missed.
- reubenswartz 12y agoPaul, it's awesome. I'm just being snarky. As @simonsayscode points out, some folks aren't big fans of Episodes I, II, and III. Here's hoping for a fun VII.
- anonfunction 12y agoWhere are your getting the data?
- paulhallett 12y agoGood ol' scraping from websites like wookiepedia. And watching lots and lots of Star Wars. I have the blurays, so I should be in for a fun experience whilst collecting the nitty gritty data.
- slayed0 12y agoDo yourself a favor and get the Despecialized Edition. http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-V25-MKV-IS-OUT-NOW/topic/12713/ http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-...
- paulhallett 12y agoOh that's a good point. Do I want my data to be consistent with the 1997 releases or the originals!?
- delinka 12y agoIf it's "All The Star Wars data [We]'ve Ever Wanted," then I want both. With tags telling me which data is 'original' and which changed in the '97 releases. EDIT: And a donate button so I can reward you.
- afterburner 12y agoThese are excellent. The little 'making of' documentary clip had me wondering what the fuss was about with the colour changes, but once I started watching I really appreciated it. Feels like popping the old VHS tapes in, but with modern resolution. Never knew how much it bothered me wondering if what I was watching was how I'd seen it originally (for the less obvious changes).
- happyscrappy 12y ago
- idlewan 12y agoIs there a reason you're not using numbers in the json output? "vehicle_id": "1" is better represented as: "vehicle_id": 1
- wise_young_man 12y agoWhat if the integer exceeds the maximum allowed on 32 bit machines and you try to decode the JSON?
- djtriptych 12y agoThat has nothing to do with JSON, which allows numbers of arbitrary size.
- paulhallett 12y agoThis is mostly just a typo in the examples I put, but I will consider using only strings for this type of stuff, to avoid issues.
- idlewan 12y agoGiven the dataset you have to serve, I don't think you'll be having any issues if most of the JSON parsers give you 32bit integers.
- erydo 12y agoI usually do the same thing. Both the 32-bit issue (that issue being with JSON libraries, not the spec) but also: IDs are opaque tokens. If down the road it makes sense to use UUIDs or have a sharding hash or something else, you don't want clients tied to expecting an integer datatype.
- Igglyboo 12y agoI feel like a lot of people will see that an just cast it to an int however.