Quickstart

This section goes over how to get up and running quickly. We’ll assume that you have already followed the Installation instructions, and are ready to go.

Petfinder.com credentials

Before you can make your first query to Petfinder, you’ll need to obtain a set of API credentials. You can get them from the Petfinder API page. You’ll need to register first.

Jot down your API Key and API Secret for use in the next step.

Instantiate the API client

Next, you’ll want to import the module:

>>> import petfinder

Then instantiate the API client with your Petfinder.com API credentials:

>>> api = petfinder.PetFinderClient(api_key='yourkey', api_secret='yoursecret')

You are now ready to query against the Petfinder API:

>>> breeds = api.breed_list(animal="dog")

See API Reference for a full list of methods. We support all of the query methods on the Petfinder API. Please do continue reading the next few sections in this quickstart for some important tidbits.

How to determine kwargs for API methods

petfinder-api is a very thin wrapper around the Petfinder API. We point developers to the Petfinder API docs for all of the required/optional keywords, instead of duplicating it all here.

For example, look at the pet.find method on the Petfinder API docs. This maps to our petfinder.PetFinderClient.pet_find() method. You can ignore any of the key arguments, since petfinder-api sets that for you. The only required parameter for pet.find is location. Here’s a minimal example:

for pet in api.pet_find(location="29678"):
    # This will be a pet record in the form of a dict.
    print(pet)

To outline a process for this, first determine which method in API Reference you’ll want to use:

  1. Reference the beginning of the docstring for which Petfinder API call it wraps. For example, petfinder.PetFinderClient.pet_find() wraps pet.find.
  2. Refer to the Petfinder API docs for the required kwargs.

Many calls return generators

An extremely important thing to note is that many of the calls return Python generators. This is the most efficient way for us to paginate through multiple pages of results (behind the scenes). Make sure to note the return types for whatever API client method you’re calling. More details can be found in API Reference.

Auto-pagination of results

Another thing to keep in mind is that the petfinder-api client auto-paginates through results. The count parameter in the Petfinder API determines how many results are returned per “page”. petfinder-api will happily continue to make additional API requests if you continue to iterate over the generators it returns. This will often continue until you see the infamous petfinder.exceptions.LimitExceeded exception, which you will hit on pretty much any *_find call, and some *_list calls.

The important thing to consider is that a higher count will result in larger, but fewer HTTP requests to the Petfinder API, whereas smaller values will result in more frequent, but smaller requests from the API.