libNFSNapi

An object-oriented library for using the NFSN API, written in portable C.

Yes, this page is ugly. I'm heavily hacking code here, not building a corporate web "presence"!

Feel free to send me criticism, adoration, patches and comments. My email address is at the bottom of this page. The code is licensed under the GNU GPL.

What is it?

This is a collection of C code for accessing the NearlyFreeSpeech.NET API in a fairly object-oriented way. There is Doxygen documentation available. I've also written something similar for Ruby.

Does it work?

What you need

1. A POSIX-like environment
2. libcurl (for networking)
3. An API key
4. The code
   • SVN snapshots — requires up-to-date Autotools (autoheader, autoconf, automake, etc.)
   • (sorry, no formal release yet)

1 and 2 are both available on the NFSN shell/CGI server, so you can just play with it there. If you're using a Linux distribution, or *BSD, it is extremely likely that you have a simple way of installing it through your package management system.
3 requires you to send a SSR (Secure Support Request).

Caveats/Pitfalls

• General
  • The test program (test/basic) expects to find your API key in a file called .nfsn-apikey in your home directory. Also, you'll need to edit test/basic.c to set your login name, etc.
  • The SSL certificate is not verified, just ignored. This is obviously not all that secure.
  • Most of the API isn't implemented (on NFSN's side!), so only a few things will work. Generally, if I have a function that claims to do something, that part is implemented.
• Running externally
  • If you get errors that say The authentication timestamp is out of range, you should set up NTP on your computer because the clocks of the NFSN API server and your other computer need to be synchronised to within 5 seconds.