wvsharber / apis_and_mongo_seattle-ds

This repository contains information about using APIs and MongoDB in collecting and storing data. It was designed for pedagogical purposes and began life as a fork of Miles Erickson's repository about APIs. His instructions for registering for the Foursquare API are detailed below.

Foursquare API Example

Register

• Please register for the Foursquare API and create an app. When you create the app, you can indicate that you're affiliated with Flatiron School and that you're a student.
• Create a file called .secrets/credentials.json based on .secrets/credentials-example.json

  cd .secrets
  cp credentials-example.json credentials.json
  vim credentials.json  # use your favorite editor to paste in your client ID and client secret
  cd ..
  git status  # credentials.json should not show up because .secrets/ is in .gitignore
  

Review Documentation

• https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/api/venues/search

Example API Request

import json
import requests

# Load secrets from credentials.json
url = 'https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/explore'
with open('.secrets/credentials.json') as f:
    params = json.load(f)
    
params['v'] = '20180323'
params['ll'] = '40.7243,-74.0018',
params['query'] = 'coffee',
params['limit'] = 1

response = requests.get(url=url, params=params)
data = json.loads(response.text)

Installing MongoDB

This can be easier said than done.

Try this first:

In the terminal, run:

brew install mongodb

If that doesn't work, follow the second link below. Please note that the tar and the sudo commands refer to the gzipped tar file that you just downloaded, which includes the version number in its name. The instructions below are from earlier this year and they refer to Version 3.6.1. Adjust this as needed. (When I last installed MongoDB, the version no. was 4.2.1.)

For more on installation, see here and here.