Chat API documentation

An API (Application Programming Interface) is just like a web-site that communicates raw data (like JSON) instead of well structured and designed data (like HTML/CSS). You can see an API as the poor-version of a standard website meant to be used by computers, not by human beings.

• An API is designed for communication between machines
• A standard website has a nicer human-readable interface as it's designed for humans. You can see a website as a "AHI" (Application Human Interface).

APIs are everywhere and proposed by all serious services. Here you'll read your first API documentation on a very simple example, the wagon-chat API!

Base URL

The base URL of the API is https://chat.api.lewagon.com/. Feel free to test the API using Postman, curl or the JS console directly.

Get messages GET '/:channel/messages'

Will get you the JSON file of all messages for the batch :channel. E.g:

{
  "channel": "general",
  "messages": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "author": "Boris",
      "content": "Hello",
      "channel": "general"
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "author": "Seb",
      "content": "Hi",
      "channel": "general"
    }
  ],
  "next_reset_at": "a date in the dear future"
}

⚠️ There is a cron job on the server which wipes all messages from the database every 10 minutes so they are very ephemeral.

Post a comment POST '/:channel/messages'

Will post a new comment on our API's database for the promo :channel. In the request body, you have to send the details of the post, in the following JSON format:

{
  "author": "Seb",
  "content": "Hi there"
}

The API will respond with the full details of the comment you've posted (in JSON format), e.g:

{
  "id": 8,
  "author": "Seb",
  "content": "Hi there",
  "channel": "general"
}