I’m completely new to working with APIs in R and need some guidance on the basic setup. I want to fetch airline ticket pricing information from a RapidAPI service into my R environment. I already have a RapidAPI account set up and ready to go.
What’s the standard approach for connecting to these external APIs in R? I’m looking for a basic code example that shows how to authenticate and make requests. Should I be using specific packages like httr or curl? Also, how do I handle the API keys and headers properly?
Any sample code or step-by-step walkthrough would be really helpful since I’m starting from scratch with API integration in R.
yup, httr is def the way to go! just use GET() and set your headers right - don’t forget x-rapidapi-key and x-rapidapi-host. it’s smart to keep your API key in a var to make things easier down the line.
I’ve used RapidAPI with R for a while - newcomers always mess up error handling. httr works fine, but wrap your requests in tryCatch() blocks. API calls fail constantly - network issues, rate limits, server crashes, whatever. Always check the status code AND content before processing anything. My scripts used to crash halfway through data pulls until I figured this out. RapidAPI endpoints often have per-minute request limits, so throw in some Sys.sleep() between calls if you’re grabbing tons of data. For airline data, responses get massive - bump up your timeout settings in GET() or you’ll get cut off.
httr2 is taking over from the original httr package for API work these days. With RapidAPI, you need both X-RapidAPI-Key and X-RapidAPI-Host headers - don’t skip the host header because that’s how RapidAPI routes your requests. I found this out after banging my head against auth errors despite having the right API key. Throw your credentials in .Renviron and grab them with Sys.getenv() instead of hardcoding them. Most responses come back as JSON, so use jsonlite::fromJSON() to turn it into something R can work with. Always check the status code before you try parsing the response.