Show HN: WrapAPI: a tool to build APIs and bots on top of any website | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: WrapAPI: a tool to build APIs and bots on top of any website

wrapapi.com

111 pointsarciini20 comments

Hi! I'm Peter, creator of the tool. Let me know if you have any feedback, or any possible use cases for it by posting below or emailing me at peter@wrapapi.com

I've done a lot of reverse-engineering of websites and thought a lot of the work could be made more generic. WrapAPI is an attempt to generalize a lot of the work needed to simulate actions on websites.

There are basically 4 steps:

1. Capture sample requests to serve as a reference - this is similar to how one might use the Chrome Developer Tools or a packet sniffer to capture sample requests to the app

2. Specify inputs - parametrize the inputs so that you can switch out arguments passed to the webpage

3. Extract outputs - we have Kimono-like visual tools to select the outputs from the webpage via CSS, JSON, and Regexp selectors

4. Test it out - try it to ensure everything's working

In addition, we want users to be able to share and publish the work, so we've added that too.

You should have called it WrAPI ;)

Seems really useful, will definitely bookmark it.

I've installed the Chrome extension and now see the following error when I click on the extension:

http://i.imgur.com/TlJXFJm.png

http://i.imgur.com/q6KIE1J.png

Any tips? I'm not really sure what it's doing but I checked `netstat` and nothing appears to be listening on 127.0.0.1:60876.

This should be fixed as of version 0.15. Please make sure you're on that Chrome extension version. Thanks!

Getting the same error also. Cool tool and hope to check it out when I can figure it out what's wrong

Is there a way to discover existing apis built with wrapapi? Without knowing what to search for, I'd love to browse for some ideas.

This reminds me of a very old Perl module called HTTP::Recorder [1]. It used to set a Http Proxy for WWW::Mechanize and then output a WWW::Mechanize script to automate the requests.

I used for testing long time back. Of course it didn't allow Javasript because it ran on Mechanize but it also meant it was extremely fast.

[1] http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/06/04/recorder.html

Cool concept - I'm really interested to see what I can build with it.

I installed the chrome extension, and saved a request to an endpoint, but it's not showing up in my account under 'My API endpoints'. Is there something special I have to do to get it to show up?

edit: sent an email.

hi! some constructive criticism.

i love the idea, connecting developer tools via a plugin to the site is genius. this is a very creative way of doing this, and it's perfect.

the user interface on the site is pretty messy though. i've just tried to fetch my first data and it just got to messy to be worth it. it's currently (for me at least) less messy doing this sort of thing manually than clicking around in the interface, and that should give you a hint that the ux needs some work.

will check back in the future though, it looks very promising!

Thanks for trying it out this far fjallstrom! Out of curiosity, which part of the process did you get stuck on? We've been trying to work on the UI a lot, so would love the feedback.

What's the difference between your service and import.io?

Looks neat, how does it work? Also, you guys should make the Chrome extension more prominent as that seems to be very neat.

It works by letting you capture network requests and then replicating those network requests exactly.

This includes tools to parametrize GET and POST requests, as well as a set of tools to extract data from the webpage itself.

We're working on a video demoing how it works! Let me know if there are particular use cases in mind and I'd be happy to try to help out on those.

Is this similar to https://www.getpostman.com/ ? If so, what do you think will differentiate your app? Thanks!

It's similar in that it captures requests, but Postman is mostly targeted at making APIs that already exist more useful, while WrapAPI aims to fill the gap where there currently are no APIs. It also:

- Parses the output into a machine-readable format (similar to Kimono Labs)

- Allows you to publish the request and its schema to a publicly accessible API endpoint, rather than just testing existing API endpoints

Hope this helps! Give it a shot; it's a very powerful tool

I didn't see the bot part of it?

Think(!) it's about building an API. Around the API you can, if u want, build a bot. That's why there API-Keys i think (I can't imagine another possible scenario). With that keys a bot would have access.

Yup, that's right. Half of building a bot involves getting the machine-readable data, and that's the part that we try to make easier.

Exactly the first use case that came to my mind. Exciting times ahead :-)

Is this open source? If not, I see no point in using a tool that can be changed underneath me to wrap APIs around web sites that change underneath me.

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