Introduction

What is LinkPreview?

LinkPreview is an API that provides detailed info. of almost every website. It is built using FastAPI & Beautiful Soup

How does it work?

When you send us a link, we fetch it in our servers, format it and validate it, we will then send you back a preview of what's behind the link.

Why is it useful?

LinkPreview summarize the contents of the URL and display the name of the given website, an image and a description of the website's content.

It's difficult to undestand a string of undecipherable characters like https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ. LinkPreview provides you detailed website information - title, preview image, and short description in JSON format by default for any given URL

API Endpoints

We provide both HTTP and HTTPS endpoints for our service:

Endpoint	HTTP Method
http://rinjo.herokuapp.com/link_preview/	POST
https://rinjo.herokuapp.com/link_preview/	POST

Response Fields

Name	Type	Description	Example Response
title	string / boolean	Website title	Google
description	string / boolean	Description	Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for.
image	bytes - base64 / boolean	Preview image URL	AAABAAIAEBAAAAEAIABoBAAAJgAAACAgAAABACAAqBAAAI4EAAAoAAA
msg	string	Response of the URL	"Invalid URL" or "Can't process URL" or "Connection Time out"

Note - 1

Example Response of bytes - base64 is just sample format of the image base64 encoded. If title, description or image return false then it means our API could not fetch the data from the URL.

Examples

jQuery

POST Request using Ajax

$.ajax({
    type: 'post',
    contentType: "application/json",
    url: "https://rinjo.herokuapp.com/link_preview/",
    data: JSON.stringify({
        url: "https://www.google.com"
    }),
    success: function(data) {            
        console.log(data);
    },
    error: function(data) {
        console.log(data);
    }
});

POST Request using Python

import requests

API_URL = "http://rinjo.herokuapp.com/link_preview/"
target = "https://www.google.com"
try:
    response = requests.post(API_URL, json={'url': target}, timeout=60)
    print(response.json())
except Exception as e:
    print(e)

JSON Response

{
    "title": "Google",
    "description": "Search the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for.",
    "image": "AAABAAIAEBAAAAEAIABoBAAAJgAAACAgAAABACAAqBAAAI4EAAAoAAA"
}

Note - 2

Example Response of bytes - base64 is just sample format of the image base64 encoded

Live Demo

LinkPreview API Live Demo

Full Frontend Example - Codepen

LinkPreview - Codepen

How to Setup in your local machine?

• Clone the repository using git clone https://github.com/4akhilkumar/LinkPreview.git
• Install the Python 3.8 or above

For Windows

1. Install the Virtualenv using pip install virtualenv
2. Create a virtual environment using python -m venv venv
3. Activate the virtual environment using venv\Scripts\activate
4. Install the requirements using python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

For Linux

1. Install the Virtualenv using pip3 install virtualenv
2. Create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv venv
3. Activate the virtual environment using source venv/bin/activate
4. Install the requirements using python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

• If requirements installation failed, try these commands as per your OS:
  python -m pip install fastapi uvicorn[standard] beautifulsoup4 requests

• Run the server using uvicorn <file_name>:app --reload