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Access to the API

Following is documentation on ways to access the API from various software contexts.

For general information on using the API, see api.md.

Access from shell (bash) using wget

wget is a common shell utility, similar to curl, for doing HTTP requests. Suppose the API token is in a file called api.token. The following illustrates use of wget with the cypher service:

wget -O cypher.out --header "Authorization: JWT `cat api.token`" \
  https://eol.org/service/cypher?query="MATCH (n:Trait) RETURN n LIMIT 1;"

Or, if the Cypher query is in a file called query.cypher:

wget -O cypher.out --header "Authorization: JWT `cat api.token`" \
  https://eol.org/service/cypher?query="`cat query.cypher`"

These commands may only work from bash, which is the shell that I use, and the standard shell on most GNU/Linux systems.

Access from shell using curl

Example POST request with a query in file query.cypher:

curl https://eol.org/service/cypher -H "Authorization: JWT $(cat api.token)" \
    --data-urlencode query@query.cypher

You'll need to POST lengthy queries due to URL length limits. This is likely also possible with wget but hasn't been tested.

Access using python

A simple python program that invokes the /service/cypher API call is given here. The name of the file containins the token is given as a command line argument, and the query is given as a second command line argument, for example (typed at the shell):

python3 cypher.py --tokenfile=api.token --query="MATCH (n:Trait) RETURN n LIMIT 1;"

For cypher.py see here. This module may be adapted for use in particular python programs.

Warning: The beta.eol.org site uses TLS1.2 for connection privacy (https:). This version of TLS seems to be not fully supported in the version of Python that is built in to MacOS 10.12 (Sierra), and may be absent from tools of similar vintage. If the example fails with an SSL error, make sure you have an up to date version of openssl (1.0.1 works, at least) and a version of Python that uses it. I find this puzzling since TLS 1.2 was published ten years ago, but I am just relaying my experience.

Access from a web form

Put the following in a file with extension .html, and open it in a browser. This mode of use does not require a token if you are logged in to the EOL site.

<h1>Cypher query</h1>
<form action='https://eol.org/service/cypher'>
  <textarea name='query' id='query' cols='50' rows='5'>MATCH (n:Trait) RETURN n LIMIT 1;</textarea>
  <input type='submit' />
</form>