Introduction

The APIs of your microservices on Skygear can be called with the fetch method provided in Skygear JS SDK, or with tools like cURL that can make HTTP-based requests.

Prerequisites

Before you start this section, please ensure you have skycli installed and configured properly. If not, follow this to set it up.

You will need your service(s) deployed on Skygear before you can call them, where skycli is the only way to perform deployments.

TL;DR Sooner or later you will need to install and configure skycli.

Call APIs using the Skygear JS SDK

We recommend you to use fetch in Skygear JS SDK to call your APIs, since it not only manages the users sessions but also throws in required headers for you.

Assume you already have a web frontend and a up-and-running microservice on Skygear.

Install the SDK in the frontend client

The CDN way:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/@skygear/web"></script>

The npm install or yarn install way:

$ npm install @skygear/web
# OR
$ yarn add @skygear/web

Configure the SDK with your app's endpoint and API key

skygear.configure({
  endpoint: '<INSERT API ENDPOINT HERE>',
  apiKey: '<INSERT API KEY HERE>'
});

Fetch!

Assuming that a microservice is deployed under the path api and would like to send a request to one of its APIs fetch_blogs, we can achieve this with Skygear SDK as shown below:

skygear
    .fetch('api/fetch_blogs', { method: 'POST' })
    .then((resp) => resp.json())
    .then((posts) => console.log(posts));

This API fetch_blogs actually exists in one of our Skygear demos. Visit this guide for more information.

Call APIs using cURL

Similarly, you can curl the exact same API:

curl -X POST \
  https://<your-app>.skygearapp.com/api/fetch_blogs \
  -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' \
  -H 'Connection: keep-alive' \
  -H 'Content-Length: 33' \
  -H 'accept: */*' \
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-mode: cors' \
  -H 'sec-fetch-site: same-site' \
  -H 'x-skygear-api-key: <your_app_key>' \

The request is visibly bulkier, plus extra effort is spent to substitute values like a Skygear API key. This is nevertheless the go-to option when you would like to test out an API quickly without having to install some SDKs and initialise a new project.