# Using a RESTful API

REST APIs are extremely popular on the web and allow you to freely grab a site's data if it has an available API over an HTTP connection.
If you've ever seen a music bot that accepts a YouTube query instead of just a video's URL, then you've seen a REST API in action. You've probably used an API yourself if you've grabbed data from another page before.

# Making HTTP requests with Node.js

The library we will be using is gotopen in new window. Proceed to install the got package:

yarn add got

npm i got --save

# Base code

We are going to use the command handler we have created earlier, so go on and read it if you haven't (You should have). Open your command prompt, navigate to your project's root directory and run the following:

cd commands
mkdir fun
cd fun
touch meme.js # HINT: look at the file name to guess what this command will be about

Open meme.js in your text editor, and put in the code for the command handler:

const got = require('got'); // require `got`
module.exports = {
	name: 'meme',
	description: 'fetches memes from reddit', // hooray if you guessed correctly
    args: false,
	cooldown: 2,
	async execute(message, args, prefix) {
    
  }
};

# Using got

got is a (🌐) Human-friendly and powerful HTTP request library for Node.js. It is Promise-based, which means you will either need to use async/await or .then(). In this guide, we will use the latter.

To fetch memes from reddit, we will need to query https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/random/.jsonopen in new window, which gives us a random meme from r/memesopen in new window.
As you can see, we have already required got at the top of the file by doing the following:

const got = require('got');

To fetch the JSON from Reddit, you'd do the following:

got('https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/random/.json')
  .then((response) => {
    console.log(response)
  })

You have just sent a request to Reddit, and if you look at your console now, you should see a huge lump of JSON there. However, JavaScript doesn't understand it yet, so we need to parse it:

got('https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/random/.json')
		.then((response) => {
			const list = JSON.parse(response.body);
		});

JSON.parse(response.body);

Now, we have the parsed JSON stored inside the list variable. We now need to extract the data and send it:

got('https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/random/.json')
		.then((response) => {
			const [list] = JSON.parse(response.body);
			const [post] = list.data.children;

			const permalink = post.data.permalink;
			const memeUrl = `https://reddit.com${permalink}`;
			const memeImage = post.data.url;
			const memeTitle = post.data.title;
			const memeUpvotes = post.data.ups;
			const memeNumComments = post.data.num_comments;
			message.channel.createMessage({
				embed: {
					title: memeTitle,
					url: memeUrl,
					image: {
						url: memeImage,
					},
					color: 15267908,
					footer: {
						text: `👍 ${memeUpvotes} 💬 ${memeNumComments}`,
					},
				},
			});
		})
		.catch(err => {
			console.error(err);
		});

We used the following:

.catch(err => {
  console.error(err);
});

to catch any errors and prevent errors from crashing the bot, and log it into the console.
That's about it for the meme command!