How To Guide

Photo Credits:https://www.inoreader.com/developers/oauth

Now I want to begin this section by stating that AniList has good documentation explaining the use of Oauth 2.0 to receive authorization to make calls. Here is the link . We will be covering some of the same things but more on how to do it in a programming language rather than a manual URL request through a browser. The way I am about to teach you is not recommended for a production ready application but it can be used to make calls for information in something like a tool for personal use. I also would like to link you to the OAuth2.0 documentation located here

Api calls to access AniList's Data require the prefix: https://anilist.co/api/. After this prefix, you state a path name with certain parameters such as an access code to make calls for information. Depending on the type of "grant" used, you will have different levels of permissions to access different pieces of data. As you can imagine, the more sensitive information will require a more complicated grant. We will be covering the simple "client credentials" grant in this tutorial.

A Client credentials grant is simple; in fact, it is the simplest out of the authentication grant types. We will provide our client id, and client secret to the server. The server will then send back a response (if we provide it with the right information and it is accepted.). This response is sent as a JSON object with information such as the access token, time till expiration, and we need to parse and display the object. We will simply be viewing this in the console. So, let’s begin our first request for a token.

First, we begin our code by declaring variables that will hold our parameters. We then use these parameters to setup a new http request then we parse and log the response to the console.

Now, we have an access token. This access token will expire in an hour so when we need another we will run this code again. Go ahead and copy this value in your clipboard as we will use it in our actual data request code.