HTTP API #688
Comments
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Why would any external app interface with Liberapay? What usecase do you see for creator and donors? |
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@aggsol An unauthenticated API could be used for discovery, e.g. figuring out if a person or project has a Liberapay account. Technically we already have that but it's not documented and not versioned. OAuth could be used by:
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Some preliminary thoughts:
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I vote for:
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I tried GraphQL once, and the first problem I had is there is no official solution for authentication. You can hack something, but it seems difficult to limit authentication to some resources. And as @aggsol said, GraphQL would probably be too much for Liberapay anyway. |
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I want to voice my support for an API and I want to give an example what kind of software could integrate such an API: online banking software (e.g. MoneyMoney which provides an internal API itself https://moneymoney-app.com/api/webbanking/). The goal would be to integrate Liberapay into banking apps as if they were a real bank. To the user, there is not a big difference:
So if LP could be treated like a bank account, it would automatically integrate into online banking software that is itself has an open API. An even more useful step would be to actually provide FINTS [1] compatibility which would make LP compatible with all online banking software in Germany. However, a simple HTTP-based API that provides balance and uniquely identified transactions would be a good start. |
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I'm looking for an API, too. I want to use LiberaPay to accept donations, but I also accept donations from Patreon and a self-hosted (also FOSS) platform. On the latter I have an aggregated summary of donations from both sources: https://drewdevault.com/donate/ I would use the API to pull that data and display it alongside the other sources here. |
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@SirCmpwn If all you need is basic public information about your account you can get that from |
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Nice, that'll do it. |
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It would be cool if sites like The Ocean Cleanup could use the oauth for there fund widget like https://www.theoceancleanup.com/fund/. Step 1 set funding and step 2 register or connect. |
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I would like to stress the importance of an authenticated API to get information about the balance and transactions. Currently, booking the few Liberapay donations is still possible manually, albeit tedious. |
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Technical note: representing money amounts as integers in JSON is not a good idea (I'm looking at you, Stripe), because it can easily result in an end-user being billed 100 times more (or less) than intended. We're currently representing money amounts as strings in our undocumented endpoints, and we should continue to use strings. |
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No no no, don't represent them as floats or strings, that's even more error prone. Representing money as cents and integers is industry standard. |
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@SirCmpwn I disagree, my personal experience is that integers are much more problematic. In python dealing with money amounts represented as strings is a piece of cake: |
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Not all languages have good decimal support like that. Consider JavaScript - where it's harder to fuck up integers than floats. If you always work in cents you're far more likely to undercharge than overcharge. I mean, it's a matter of personal opinion for you. But it's a matter of industry standard for everyone else. Don't let your personal judgement make your API surprising and error-prone. |
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Accidental floating point math errors don't result in numbers that are off by a factor of one hundred, they're far less dangerous than integers. Making an API more difficult to use from Python in order to make it easier to (mis)use from JavaScript seems like a bad trade-off to me.
They're not always cents, some currencies are "zero-decimal". |
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Well, cents are a US dollar thing. There is no demonination smaller than 1 Yen. The idea is still basically the same, it's storing integers at a precision specific enough to include the smallest demonination. |
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It's not always clear what the "smallest denomination" of a currency is, and it can change over time. By the way, PayPal's REST API uses strings for money amounts, not integers. |
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Well, I've made my point. I'm not convinced but it's your API. |
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A decimal would work fine as long as the payload also includes the power of ten to adjust it by. US$ would, for example, have a value of 2 passed along with the amount, and the value can then be calculated internally as Strings, however, have this information built in to a single value. Language-specific precision issues can be bypassed by grabbing the integer form of the amount with the decimal point already removed (it's generally fairly simple to remove all instances of a given character from a string), and counting the number of characters after the decimal point in the string value to determine the places adjustment. Really, it's all sixes. |
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Having chimed in on the technical side, I have another use case to propose. Patreon permits OAuth logins to be used to unlock backer-only content on external sites. Most often, from what I've seen, this amounts to early access to things the general public will get to see later. My specific use case is exactly that – offering early access to web comic content for folks who back or otherwise donate, as a "thank you" rather than a purchase. I'd love to integrate Liberapay the same way, so that creators can enjoy this functionality without needing Patreon at all (or possibly even alongside it). |
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@danhunsaker That use case is forbidden by the current terms of service. Donors must not receive any reward: no early access, no publicity, nothing. The discussion about modifying the terms of service is liberapay/liberapay.org#12, I've copied your comment there. |
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That's an entirely fair point. FLO as an ideology really doesn't support that use case, after all. Luckily, other use cases presented here are still valid! |
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Hi folks, I'd like to chime in here and show a use case that is taking off in the world of Javascript. The open collective install banner: https://github.com/nuxt/opencollective. When you install a package, it shows the creator's project page and some meta data etc. I want to create this for liberapay but I'd need API access to get started. |
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Silly me, I've just seen #688 (comment), sorry for noise! |
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Being able to add a webhook for successful transactions would allow external count tracking for uses such as donor-rewards for reaching milestones, etc. |
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@Changaco Just curious — is this being worked on? If so, how far along is it? |
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@12people I haven't started implementing this. |
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Ok, thanks for the info! |
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Is there any new status here? |
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No. Having a proper HTTP API would be nice, but it still isn't a priority. I encourage you to share why you want an API, what you would like to do with it. |
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That is easy.
I want to create an Android App for the F-Store
Holen Sie sich Outlook für Android<https://aka.ms/AAb9ysg>
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Subject: Re: [liberapay/liberapay.com] HTTP API (#688)
No. Having a proper HTTP API would be nice, but it's still not a priority.
I encourage you to share why you want an API, what you would like to do with it.
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Thank you for the clarification. An Android app has been discussed before in liberapay/salon#214. I still think that a native app for Liberapay is too much work, and that working on #1000 is more efficient and effective. |
Having a proper API would be great if you want to get a list of the supporters/donators & your revenue |
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If you're only looking for basic public information, you can find it in If you need the full private list of patrons, you can find the links in your Patrons page, but it's difficult to automate the downloading of these private CSV files, because Liberapay currently only supports authentication tokens which eventually expire. |
As long as there's a way to get a new authentication token, that's not a problem. How can a new token be obtained? |
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Hello everyone. I am the administrator of a Mastodon instance (mastodon.cat). I wanted to integrate a bot that we have, to send messages when we receive donations, but I see that you still don't have an API that allows this. Thanks! |
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@kastwey There is currently no way to be notified when you gain a new donor. If you want to know when you receive a payment, you could use Stripe's webhooks, however you won't be able to distinguish initial payments from renewal payments. You can easily get the list of your public donors, but currently there is no clean way to automate getting the list of your private donors. |
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@Changaco How much work would be needed to allow automation to get the list of private donors? |
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@brunoais Not much. The only thing missing is read-only authentication tokens which never expire. However, since rewarding patrons is forbidden, the list of private donors has very few valid use cases. |
Took me a while to find it but you mean this, right? I failed to spot that earlier. I wish it was changed into liberapay allowing those but they are completely unrelated to liberapay in terms of responsibilities. Is there such suggestion or a place where I can write such suggestion? |
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@brunoais You can share your use case for rewards in liberapay/liberapay.org#12. |
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It would be nice to just have a link to download the CSV with a bearer token, etc. Now, I am running a process that scrapes the login process, downloads the CSV, and imports it into my system, but sometimes I can't log in, as if some kind of scraping check is working. |
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@osapon Your automated log-in attempts are probably hitting the new checks I added last week in response to a wave of abuse. I've started working on a proper mechanism for indefinite read-only access to an account. I should be able to land it before the end of next week since it's a relatively small change. |
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It's now possible to obtain stable credentials for use in scripts: https://liberapay.com/about/me/access/constant-session |
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@Changaco Excellent!! |
We need a proper HTTP API so that external apps can interface with Liberapay, and for any deep integration we need to become an OAuth provider so that apps can access and/or modify a user's donations.
Technical checklist:
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