I’m working on a cinema tracking application and need help with API integration. I want to pull movie information from a RapidAPI service using Python and store it locally.
My goal is to:
Connect to the movie database API
Retrieve the data in JSON format
Convert it into a local database (thinking SQLite would work best)
Use this as my app’s data source
I’m pretty new to working with APIs and databases, so I’m struggling to find clear documentation that explains the whole process. Has anyone done something similar? What’s the best approach for handling the API response and structuring the local storage?
Any code examples or step-by-step guidance would be amazing. Thanks in advance!
rapidapi’s actually pretty easy once u figure it out. get your api key from the dashboard, then use requests.get() with the right headers and json.loads() for the response. for sqlite - set up ur table schema first, then cursor.execute() to insert your data. pro tip: always check response status codes before parsing json or you’ll crash constantly (learned that the hard way lol)
Built something like this last year for a personal project. First thing - check the API rate limits. RapidAPI services have strict quotas and you’ll hit them fast if you’re not careful. Skip raw SQLite and use SQLAlchemy ORM instead. It’s way cleaner when you’re working with nested JSON responses. Set up caching so you’re not hammering the API for the same movie data over and over. I screwed up initially by not handling API timeouts - add proper exception handling around your requests or you’ll regret it. Requests library works fine for basic calls, but if you want to scale later, check out async libraries like aiohttp.
Built this exact workflow for a movie recommendation system six months back. Pagination was the biggest pain - movie APIs split results into chunks, so you’ll loop through tons of pages for complete data. Start simple: fetch one movie, then scale to batches. Database-wise, normalize early. Split movies, genres, and cast into separate tables instead of cramming everything together. Saves space and speeds up queries later. Heads up - RapidAPI endpoints change their data structure based on movie type or what’s available. Build your parser to handle missing fields without breaking.