B-Movies API

Introduction

For this project, I used Symfony 5.3. It uses the basic skeleton, and a few basic packages, such as apache-pack, FOS/rest-bundle, serializer, etc.

It's an API that serves as a "gateway" between the React application, and the TheMovieDB API.

It uses 4 endpoints, located at config/routes.yaml (the index endpoint does nothing).

For all of them, it's required to provide an API key. For the /movie/{id}/vote endpoint, it will also require a session_id (or session_guest_id), explained below.

Installation

1. Clone repository (I used WAMP, so the project is served inside the www folder)

2. Go to the root folder

3. Run the command composer install

Once everything is done, we can run the server that will host the project.

It's possible that the headers_module and rewrite_module need to be enabled for Apache. For possible CORS issues, I defined headers to allow every option it /public/index.php (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE/OPTIONS/...), from any origin. This is only recommended in a development env. If you wanted to use this config in a production server, you should config it so it only admits the desired origins and options.

Steps to follow

1. Create an .env file if there is none in the root (can be created elsewhere if desired)

2. Add the variables:

   • API_KEY (key for the TheMovieDB API requests)
   • API_PATH (Path of the API, in our case https://api.themoviedb.org/3)

3. Once all this is set up, we will have access to 3 of the 4 operations. For the fourth (POST), we will need to follow a few steps (detailed here)

• Request a request_token. This can be done in many ways. One would be creating a PHP function. For example:

function getAPIRequestToken() {
	$url = "{$_ENV["API_PATH"]}/authentication/token/new";
	$params = ["api_key" => $_ENV["API_KEY"]];

	$rs = $this->sendRequest($url, "GET", $params);

	if ($rs["result"]["request_token"]) {
		$request_token = $rs["result"]["request_token"];
		return $request_token;
	}

	return null;
}

Easier, with Postman:

Endpoint: https://api.themoviedb.org/3/authentication/token/new Params: api_key (GET)

• With the request_token, access to https://www.themoviedb.org/authenticate/{request_token}

• Once we have verified the user, we will be able to continue, to generate a session_id. From PHP (like before), it'd be:

function getAPISession() {
	$params = ["request_token" => $_ENV['REQUEST_TOKEN']];
	$url = "{$_ENV["API_PATH"]}/authentication/session/new?api_key={$_ENV["API_KEY"]}";

	$rs = $this->sendRequest($url, "POST", $params);
	return $rs;
}

Easier, with Postman:

Endpoint: https://api.themoviedb.org/3/authentication/session/new Params: api_key (query params), request_token (POST)

With this we will obtain our session_id. (It's required to register in the TheMovieDB website to authenticate the user, if it's not already)

4. Now that we have our session_id, we can add it to the .env file as well:
   • API_SESSION (needed for certain operations)

Conclusions

The API seems to be powerful and well documented. As a small criticism, some series seem to not be named properly, or don't follow a determined pattern.