How to use the dev.to API!

Why?

I use dev.to as my main dev blogging area now, but I want to show-off my blogs on my portfolio! So we’re going to create a simple list of the latest 3 blog articles which link back to the dev.to site. For this tutorial I’ll be showing how this can be achieved in PHP.

Let’s go!

First of all, the below is a great starting point to understand the dev.to API and all of the possible endpoints.

The state of dev.to v0 api

We’re going to be using this endpoint: https://dev.to/api/articles?username=nataliedeweerd which generates a JSON object with the author’s latest 30 articles. To get your personal endpoint, something change the nataliedeweerd username to your own.

So how do we get this data into our website? In PHP we can use something called cURL. cURL (client URL) is a PHP library which allows you to make HTTP requests. So you can call a URL in your code and get a HTML response from it.

The below code shows a basic curl function which gets us our data:

$curl = curl_init();

curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
  CURLOPT_URL => "https://dev.to/api/articles?username=nataliedeweerd",
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
  CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
  CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => "GET",
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
    "cache-control: no-cache"
  ),
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);
$err = curl_error($curl);

curl_close($curl);

We need to decode this data before we can effectively use it however.

$response = json_decode($response, true); 

This decodes the json object into a much more usable array! All we need to do now is loop through the array, and print out the results.

foreach ($response as $key => $article){

	echo '
		<a href="'.$article['url'].'" class="blog__article">
			<h2>'.$article['title'].'</h2>
			<div class="blog__description">'.$article['description'].'</div>
			<div class="blog__readmore">Read More</div>
		</a>
	';

	if ($key == 2){ break; }

}

Because the array key’s are numeric, we can use these to determine how many articles we’ve printed. If we’ve printed 3 articles the key will be 2 (array’s start from 0 don’t forget), so we break out of the foreach.

If you want to have a closer look at what keys the array is printing out, you can use the below code before the foreach loop:

echo '<pre>'.print_r($response,true).'</pre>';

This will show you everything the decoded JSON is returning, allowing you to include your article’s images, or canonical links, or tags!

And that’s it! We just need to apply a bit of CSS and our dev.to articles are printing out wherever we want!