About

APIs are the scaffolding that holds up the modern Internet and standards-based descriptions of those APIs are what make them usable.

The mission of APIs.IO is to help developers get their APIs discovered and used by indexing electronic API descriptions. The site then parses descriptions and provides a searchable entry point to the world of APIs.

Our aim is not only to provide a search entry point, but to encourage more high quality API descriptions to be posted and, in-turn, to help more search/indexing efforts to get off the ground. To this end, the project will be providing:

  • For API Owners:
    • Information on standard descriptions
    • Scoring tools: grading API descriptions for completeness and accuracy
    • Generator tools: an APIS.JSON generator.
    • Add link service: web page and API call to add new API descriptions to the index.
  • For other search efforts:
    • Index download: API calls to download the index of currently tracked APIs so they can bootstrap their own search effort.
    • (Coming later) Open Source code and deployment patterns: to start a new search engine.

The standards we support may evolve over time, but at the current time these are:

The project is a personal effort and unfunded, so response times and service quality is on a best-effort basis. If you have problems with the service please let us know by emailing: [email protected].

The maintainers of the project are: Kin Lane (API Evangelist), Nicolas Grenier (Typeform Inc.) and Steven Willmott (Timewarp Labs).