I was curious to figure out if I could retrieve the number of views the posts I create on the Dev.to community and see how the numbers evolve over time. I found that the Dev.to platform has a good extensive and well documented API: https://docs.dev.to/api/ where you can read the information I was looking for. In the documentation you can see how to create your person access token. Remember to insert this token into the script below where you find the string YOUR-PRIVATE-API-KEY-HERE.
The script is meant to be run by a scheduler once every day to retrieve the article statistics. The script will persist the retrieved article statistics into a JSON file named devToArticleStats.json. It looks like the admins at Dev.to only updates your statistics once a day, so no need to run the script more than once every day.
The script is in Python and it does the following:
- Read the 'devToArticleStats.json' file if it already exists
- Fetch the article statistics from the Dev.to API
- For each article retrieved:
- If the article does not exists in the internal structure then create a new instance and add it to the internal structure.
- If the statistics for today already exists the update them with the retrieved data, else create a new instance of the statistics for today.
- Save the internal structure into the 'devToArticleStats.json' file in JSON format.
Now you have the data in JSON format and then its up to you how you want to have fun with it. You could start by visualizing the data :-)
Remember to create a scheduled task in the Windows Scheduler, the Cron scheduler on Linux or the 'whatever-its-called' scheduler on macOS.
This is the script:
import requests
import json
import datetime
import dateutil.parser
from os import path
from typing import List
class ArticleStats(object):
def __init__(self, date: str, page_views_count: int, public_reactions_count: int, comments_count: int):
self.date = date
self.page_views_count = page_views_count
self.public_reactions_count = public_reactions_count
self.comments_count = comments_count
class Article(object):
def __init__(self, title: str, published: str, stats: List[ArticleStats] = []):
self.title = title
self.published = published
self.stats = stats
class DevStats(object):
def __init__(self, articles: List[Article]):
self.articles = articles
def toJSON(self):
return json.dumps(self, default=lambda o: o.__dict__, sort_keys=True, indent=4)
url = "https://dev.to/api/articles/me"
headers = {
'api-key': 'YOUR-PRIVATE-API-KEY-HERE', # You have to put your own api-key here. How to get a api-key: https://docs.dev.to/api/#section/Authentication/api_key
'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.96 Safari/537.36'
}
statsFilename = "devToArticleStats.json"
if(path.exists(statsFilename)): # If the statistics json file already exist then read it so we later can append the retrieved data to it
statsFile = open(statsFilename, 'r')
devToStatsJson = str(statsFile.read())
statsFile.close()
else:
devToStatsJson = '{ "articles": [] }'
devToJson = requests.get(url, headers=headers).json() # Call the api to retrieve the statustics
devToStatsDict = json.loads(devToStatsJson)
devToStats = DevStats(**devToStatsDict)
articleStats = ""
for articleFromDev in devToJson:
publishedObj = dateutil.parser.isoparse(articleFromDev['published_at'])
publishedStr = datetime.datetime.strftime(publishedObj, "%d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S")
title = articleFromDev['title']
pageViews = articleFromDev['page_views_count']
reactions = articleFromDev['public_reactions_count']
comments = articleFromDev['comments_count']
existingArticle = next((article for article in devToStats.articles if article['title'] == title), None) # Get the article from the dictionary if it exists else add a new instance
if existingArticle == None:
existingArticle = {'title': title, 'published': publishedStr, 'stats': []}
devToStats.articles.append(existingArticle)
today = str(datetime.date.today())
articleStats = next((stats for stats in existingArticle['stats'] if stats['date'] == today), None) # Get the stats for today from the dictionary if it exists else add a new instance
if articleStats == None:
articleStats = ArticleStats(today, pageViews, reactions, comments)
existingArticle['stats'].append(articleStats)
else:
articleStats['page_views_count'] = pageViews
articleStats['public_reactions_count'] = reactions
articleStats['comments_count'] = comments
statsFile = open(statsFilename, 'w') # Save the article stats to the statistics json file
statsFile.write(devToStats.toJSON())
statsFile.close()
Top comments (6)
Hey,
How can I display article content on my blog using Django and dev to API without having to be redirected to Dev.To to read it.
Right now I can display the title, cover image and description but I cannot figure out how to display the article itself.
would you mind helping me with that please?
I guess its not possible yet. I searched for this here developers.forem.com/api#tag/comments.
Did you found anything for this?
I figured it out.
dev.to/the_greatbonnie/how-to-disp...
Hi,
You can make a GET request to the url dev.to/api/articles/me just like in the code above.
Then you can loop through the returned json and for each article you can use the id to make a GET request to the dev.to/api/articles/{id}
In the returned json you get the body_html or the body_markdown to get the article body.
Have a look at the docs here docs.dev.to/api/#operation/getArti... for more details.
Hope that helps you on your way.
Would be possible to I fetch the stats by day, not only the full stats count ?
IT does not look like you can get the stats for a given day.
You can find the api documentation here: developers.forem.com/api/v1#tag/ar...