How To Use Reddit API On Reddit: Complete Guide

Reddit is a veritable gold mine of up-to-date information. Because text is the most common form of communication among users, this fact is very important for the natural speech community. To assist developers in their efforts to build apps, Reddit has created an API.

Yes, Reddit has an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows developers to access and interact with Reddit’s data and functionality programmatically, enabling the creation of applications and tools that integrate with the platform.

We, therefore, prepared this article after sorting everything out in the hopes that it can assist a few of you in becoming comfortable with using the Reddit API.

Table of Contents

What is an API?

An API (application programming interface) is nothing new if you’re a coder. You have been using API documentation when you call a class or function from a codebase that you did not write. Likewise, you were only given instructions on how to run some useful code created by another coder.

Moreover, don’t need to utilize it because you don’t know how it works. An analogous thing is a web application. An “endpoint” is something that a website or service exposes. You may think of an “endpoint” as a program you can contact.

It is called by sending an HTTP request (typically a GET or POST request) to the endpoint’s URL. After processing, the endpoint will act upon your request, often returning data in XML format.

Reddit’s API

Reddit is one of the most popular social networking platforms on the internet. Reddit can offer discussion groups for many major and obscure topics because users can create their subreddits. Users also have the option to send personal messages to other users as well as post, delete, comment, like, or dislike the content that others have posted.

Practically every activity a user can do on the website can be managed programmatically with the aid of the Reddit API. It permits the creation of apps that can completely remodel a website with a new design and bots that can improve site functioning. Reddit API example: Fetch actions, javascript.

How To Use Reddit API On Reddit

Before we can use the Reddit API, there are several procedures we must take.

Install The App

Let us now learn about the installation process of the API on Reddit.

The first step is to create a Reddit account, Reddit Username, for our client. Login into a Reddit account to begin. You might prefer to establish a profile, and for the bot, we’ll start creating one instead, as your profile will be linked to this app. After logging in and completing the form to create your app, visit this page. Most of the information is geared toward programmers creating online or mobile applications.

We want it to run with one machine, such as a server because we’re creating a bot. Fill out the form as follows:

Identity: The name application’s name (use something unique).
There are about three options provided as radio buttons in this app type. Choose “script.”
The description of your application. Leave this field empty.
About URL: omit this information.
Return URI: The URI to which the client will direct itself after user authentication. You can leave this empty because local scripts are not required to authenticate users.
After you’ve finished creating your application, a page summarising the app’s details will redirect you. The user ID and the private keys are two additional fields that we are looking at. Under your app’s name, in the upper left area, is the client ID. The string that comes after the word “secret” is the secret key. Keep both of these handy for when you need them. Also, you need to authenticate.

Authentication

Let us now learn about the authentication process of the API on Reddit.

You can find Reddit’s authentication documentation here. Nevertheless, several complicated authentication techniques are available based on anything you want to perform. The Reddit API’s authentication methods are API calls in and of themselves and are the most challenging.

Since there aren’t many excellent resources available for overcoming this obstacle, I’ll go through the process step by step. There are two viable options for our needs (creating a local script) based on anything we want to achieve.

We must authenticate using our account to have full accessibility to the API. Either we can authorize the app without signing in or log in as ourselves to access all OAuth actions that require a user to sign in. Both will allow accessibility to OAuth-required System calls, and only the sign-in choice will let you use API calls that carry out user-specific functions.

Utilizing It

Let us now learn about how to use the API on Reddit.

Let’s log in to look at the user account details. We will connect to the API/v1/me endpoint to finish this. A simple GET query is all you need to submit to the endpoint’s URL when signed in.
Remember that the default URL for all Reddit Application requests is “oauth.reddit.com.” The whole URL of the end must be there because we need JSON data.

The Bot

Learn about the various ways to create and use a Reddit bot.

Reddit offers many tools for helping users locate content that is relevant to their interests. However, it can be challenging to discover threads that aren’t completely new or popular while they’re still alive. Additionally, there is no mechanism to keep track of topics relevant to your interests in a given subreddit. We’re going to address that issue in this.

In this tutorial, we’ll construct a bot that can watch a user-defined subreddit for new topics and notify the user when a discussion with a keyword they provided has been started. For instance, perhaps we should keep an eye on new threads in r/webdev that have something to deal with the Java language.

Additional Choices

Look at various additional choices you can make while using Reddit.

After/before – We can cut the data we receive back by supplying the full name of a thread. For instance, this would enable us to disregard any threads extracted from a previous message.
Limit enables us to set a cap on the number of threads we receive back, as the name suggests. The maximum value is 100; the default value is 25.
Count indicates how many threads have already been displayed. Another method to prevent seeing threads that have already been handled.
Show: The sole possible value is “all,” which allows us to retrieve hidden threads. This is unnecessary for our needs.

How do the Reddit APIs function?

Reddit’s interface is quite straightforward, contributing significantly to the platform’s ability to foster communities that grow quickly. Users may quickly browse to any location as long as they know the identity of the community, the individual, or the post they’re attempting to connect with.

Users, comments, and subreddits (the different topic-themed discussion boards) are each neatly organized under their site subsection. Utilizing that structure, APIs can automate requests by comparing the requested data to the established site hierarchy.

A Reddit API is for whom?

Reddit offers a wide range of data, making it a useful source for data scraping for many different applications. This enables developers with a thorough understanding of how to alter routes in creative ways to make the most of these APIs.

However, they’ll be equally helpful for any social media application that wants to directly incorporate Reddit communications into their user interfaces.

What makes Reddit APIs so crucial?

Despite being founded back in 2005, Reddit is still among the most widely used social media sites worldwide. This makes Reddit one of the most significant information sources on the planet, along with the fact that it makes data scraping very simple.

APIs make it easier to use such data in intriguing ways.

ABOUT PRAW:

A Python module called PRAW (Python Reddit API Wrapper) offers easy access to Reddit’s API. PRAW is simple to use and complies with Reddit’s API guidelines.

Prerequisites:

Python Programming Fundamentals
Reddit is a network of people sharing similar interests. Each of these groups is a subreddit. Users can interact with different subreddits by posting, commenting, and subscribing.
An Account on Reddit

We use the terminal or command prompt to execute the following pip script to install PRAW.

pip install praw

We must import PRAW after installing it.

We must instantiate PRAW after importing it. Two categories of PRAW instances exist:

Read-only Instance: With a read-only instance, Reddit’s public information can only be retrieved. Data such as the top 10 posts from a particular subreddit. We are unable to post content from this.
Authorized Instance: Using this feature, we can perform all actions that a standard Reddit account is capable of. You can take actions like commenting, posting, reposting, and upvoting.

Let’s look at some of the operations PRAW can help us accomplish:

To access a subreddit, go to Reddit. Subreddits are communities within Reddit. Using the method subreddit, we can get a subreddit object.
Access a Submission: Each subreddit has several post submissions available. The submit instance’s submissions can be iterated over. Reddit gives us several options for sorting submissions:

rising

new

hot

gilded

controversial

top

Access a Redditor: A Redditor is a user on the Reddit website. Using the method Redditor, we can get the Redditor instance. The Redditor’s username is passed into the procedure.

FAQ’S

The Reddit API Is It Free?

Other Reddit APIs are all free to access, except for the Socialgrep API, which is used to search comments and posts going back to 2010.

What Does An API Endpoint, Reddit?

Simply put, it's a location or URI from which information in a Rest API can be received, changed, or created. A very straightforward example may be /API/users. You might get access to the endpoint for user data by submitting a GET query to this URI. This might be fundamental data on ALL users.

Precisely Why Is Reddit A Popular Choice In India?

With Reddit's unique upvote and downvote system, it can determine not only what individuals prefer but also what they do not like. Apply this information. Reddit can quickly search through hundreds of thousands of posts.

Is Reddit A Part Of Social Media?

Reddit is aka social media, but it does not have any other social programs. It revolves around communities(for example subreddits) as opposed to persons. This forum with social media marketing aspects because of its anonymous members, which could make it easier to use and user-friendly.

What Are Reddit's API Access Policies?

This Reddit API documentation was generated automatically. Please be mindful of and adhere to our API access policies. Many endpoints on Reddit actively manage pagination and filtering using the same protocol. These endpoints, known as “listings,” share five parameters: after/before, limit, count, and display.

Conclusion

By this point, you ought to be able to utilize the Reddit Rocket League fairly effectively. Even though we’ve only written a small portion of the accessible methods, the ideas discussed in the API techniques are broadly relevant to the remainder of the API and thus should make using it straightforward. The above-mentioned calls fetch user profiles, write articles, fetch topics, and perform other functionalities.

Carly Earl

Carly Earl, Guardian Australia’s pic editor, was a photographer and pic editor in Sydney for 8 yrs. She worked for The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.