Tips for working with our API

• Postman and RESTED are good starter tools.
• Make full use of our Testing Console to visualize correct headers.
• RESTED browser extension for Google Chrome gives you access to your rested tabs seamlessly as needed.
• Postman is an API platform that helps beginner and intermediate users build and use APIs in a step by step fashion.

After learning to make successful API calls through the above options, attempt to write your own code. An extension can help you troubleshoot by separating client-code bugs from network issues.

• Always check HTTP and our internal API error codes (described in API docs). No HTTP response signifies something's faulty on the client side.
• Play with our Testing Console (launched from the API docs page). It provides several examples of what works and what doesn't. This console shows how the actual header would look.
• Observe correct formatting for JSON encoding and "urlencoded" encoding of "long_url." Also, don't forget to encode the "user:password" part of the header with base64 encoding. See the description of HTTP Basic authentication.
• "long_url" should be part of the POST payload. And not simply attached to the URL.

Use PHP exception handling to see actual error messages, like this:

try{
        $surl = $client->shorten($url, $data);
}catch(\Exception $e){
        print $e->getMessage();
}

Set Content-Type header for HTTP requests. So headers part would look like this:

    headers: {
        'Authorization': 'Basic XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX',
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        'Content-Length': message.length
    }