Getting Started with the Bluesky API: A Simple Search Script in Python

As an input for personal data analysis projects and research, I started exploring the Bluesky public API.

This is just a short post to share a simple script in case it may be useful as a starting point for others. The script queries the public Bluesky search API, and returns the top 100 posts, formatted as clickable URL’s, based on the search criteria provided:

# libraries
import requests
import json

# variables
endpoint = 'https://public.api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.feed.searchPosts'
skeet_link_format = 'https://bsky.app/profile/{}/post/{}'
skeets = []
params = {
    'q': '#alf',
    'author': '',
    'sort': '',
    'limit': '100'
    }

# make the request
r = requests.get(endpoint, params=params)

# check response and parse content
if r.status_code == 200:
    response = json.loads(r.content)
    for post in response['posts']:
        skeets.append(skeet_link_format.format(
            post['author']['handle'],
            post['uri'].rsplit('/', 1)[-1])
        )
    for skeet in skeets:
        print(skeet)
else:
    print(
        'Uh Oh!',
        '\nHTTP Status:', r.status_code,
        '\nResponse Content: ', r.content
    )

The q: parameter is the main search query and accepts strings and/or hashtags. I also specified a few others as optional means of filtering (by author, by latest instead of top, or simply limiting the number of records returned.) Other optional query parameters can be found here and the schema for the posts JSON element of the response can be found here.

You’ll need to pip install requests, but otherwise this should run as-is for anyone using python3.

Wrapping Up

That’s it for now. In future posts, I’ll explore the Bluesky API and SDK further as well as visualize some of the interesting data points.

Thanks for reading!