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How are private front-ends built without APIs? (lemdro.id)

submitted 3 months ago by governorkeagan@lemdro.id to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I'm referring to projects like redlib or invidious.

I was thinking about doing something similar for a local second-hand marketplace and got curious. Redlib seems to use token spoofing to get past rate limits and Invidious doesn't even use the official YouTube API.

The only way I thought of, which would be slow, is to scrape the site (like you would with Beautiful Soup).

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[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You should look into how the webpage is built. If it's a static HTML webpage pre-rendered on the server, then you would have to scrape the HTML to extract the info.

However, many more "modern" webpages use client-side JavaScript to separately request the actual data from the web server through a REST/HTTP API. This kind of API is not possible to fully restrict, unless they want to require all users to log in for viewing the webpage.
And yeah, if it's built like that, then you'd want to make use of that REST API. You do not need to use JavaScript to call it. Using any HTTP client library in any programming language, or even just curl, should work just as much.

To see, if it's built like that, open the "Network" tab in the Developer Tools of your browser and refresh the webpage.
If it just loads a bunch of HTML, CSS and image files, then it's the static webpage kind. If it sends/receives messages with JSON in the body to URLs without a file-type, then it's likely the REST-API-kind.

[–] governorkeagan@lemdro.id 1 points 3 months ago

I’ve got a feeling it’s a static site but I’ll confirm to make sure.