API to serve puzzles by ID

[khanalizadeh]

As far as I know, currently there is no way to receive puzzle information through an API. The current way to get this information is by downloading the whole puzzle database and looking it up locally.

For many use cases in which one needs to get a small number of puzzles by ID, this method is pretty unreasonable. Also, keeping the data updated is a hassle.

It would be a useful feature to have an API method that serves puzzle based on ID (Or depending on performance considerations, other reasonable queries).

[ornicar]

What's your use case?

[khanalizadeh]

What's your use case?

This specific time, I'm trying to feed the puzzles that I failed to a spaced repetition system. I can get my own puzzle activity from the API but not the puzzle itself.

I can think of more use cases for this, and I believe this has been asked several times before.

[benediktwerner]

Is there any particular reason why downloading the puzzle database is "unreasonable"? The puzzle database is only a few hundred MB so it seems totally fine to just download it whole. Keeping it updated also doesn't seem particularly challenging. It doesn't change that often anyway and you could even just re-download it automatically once you encounter an unknown puzzle.

[ornicar]

The DB is only updated once a month, so there is a chance that a puzzle is missing.