Introducing API Hero: an open-source proxy that makes every API you use faster and more reliable
We’ve tackled two major headaches we’ve had when using APIs:
- Figuring out what’s going wrong when using an API is painful
- Slow endpoints can dramatically reduce the speed of your site
You only need to add a couple of lines of code in your JavaScript/Typescript frontend or backend to start seeing the benefits.
🦸♀️ Debugging requests and responses, the easy way
You need full visibility of API requests and responses to figure out what’s going wrong. But please don’t litter your code with console.log()
🙈.
You can quickly filter to find issues, then dig into the details of each request and response to diagnose the problem.
It’s really useful during development when trying to figure out how an API works, but also during production when something unexpected happens.
🐆 Speed up the APIs you use
A slow API can destroy your otherwise fast site. It’s hard to fix this, especially when you don’t control the API.
The best thing you can do is to add a caching layer so repeated requests don’t always hit the API. We provide an edge-located API cache that can consistently give you under 20ms response times.
🥸 How does this work?
API Hero is an open source proxy that’s distributed on top of Cloudflare’s 275 data centers that are located all around the world.
When you add API Hero to your product, it pushes API traffic you select to that proxy. From there we can return really fast cached responses where relevant or connect to the original API destination. Every request and response is logged so you can easily find issues and debug them.
📖 100% open source
If you’d like to contribute or run API Hero yourself, feel free to join us on our GitHub. We also offer a hosted version that you can try out for free.
API Hero is a combination of three services. The web app is a React app built using the Remix framework and runs on fly.io. The logs service is a Fastify API hosted on fly.io. The proxy is hosted on Cloudflare using Workers.
Please give us a star on GitHub to get the latest updates 💫.
🐕 Dog food anyone?
Eating your own dog food or "dogfooding" is the practice of using one's own products or services
We’re using API Hero to develop API Hero 🤯. This has helped us to quickly uncover some problems when integrating third party services .
🔮 What’s next?
What would you like us to work on next? We’d love to hear from you. Arrange a call with us or drop us a message.