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In this first section, we’ll setup some simple tools for testing APIs and make your first API calls to understand the basics. Then we’ll signup for Github (if you haven’t already) so we can access a simple app later on in the tutorial.

☑️ Checklist

[ ] Setup an API Client
[ ] GET a joke from a free API
[ ] Add yourself to the leaderboard with a POST request
[ ] Update your user with a GitHub username

Steps to Complete

1. ⚙️ Setup an API Client

As mentioned in the introduction, you already have one kind of API client, your web browser! However, it’s really only meant to be used for GET requests, and it expects all APIs to return HTML, CSS and Javascript instead of raw data, so that it can use it to make a pretty user interface (UI).

For this tutorial, we’ll need a client that can make all kinds of “requests” and show us any kind of “response” (particularly raw data) in a user friendly way. There’s a couple options for you below:

Option 1: Install a light IDE (Interactive Developer Environment)

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a popular code editor and developer environment. While you can technically write code in any text editing program, VS Code has useful features and plugins that make developers' lives easier. We'll use some of these features later on, such as tools for interacting with APIs and debugging webhooks but if this looks too difficult or you are not able to install this kind of software on your laptop, try option 2 👇.

Download and install Visual Studio Code.
Install an API Client Plugin for VS Code such as RapidAPI Client.
1. If you already have and use Postman, you can use that instead.

Option 2: Online API Client (Postman)

If you skip installing VS Code, don’t worry, you can use entirely online tools for almost everything in this tutorial. A few years ago, this wasn’t possible, but in the modern cloud age you can write, test and deploy software all from a web browser! There are still some nice things about having the tools on your computer, but it’s not required.