Pipedream is a serverless platform to connect APIs, and its combination with RapidAPI offers a powerful solution for interacting with APIs.
Pipedream can connect APIs and applications to create automated workflows. These workflows are organized as a sequence of linear steps, specified using no-code building blocks or custom Node.js code.
Pipedream allows you to use the following as the steps of a workflow:
App events. For example, send or listen to a new message in a Slack Channel.
Custom Node.js code or any npm Package.
Outbound API requests.
There are many no-code platforms for building workflows, but Pipedream stands out because it gives you code-level control when you need it — and no code when you don't. Workflows are composed of Node.js code, and steps are just Node functions, so you can easily pass data between steps and write code to process it.
Thanks to 500 integrated applications, npm support, and custom code ability, there is no limit to what you can achieve through Pipedream. Here are some example workflows:
RapidAPI Hub is the world's largest API platform with over 3 million developers using more than 30,000 APIs. There are APIs for querying all sorts of data, including Weather, Finance, Translation, Geolocation, Proxy, and more.
Imagine how much more we can do if we integrate APIs from RapidAPI Hub in Pipedream. Let's demonstrate that by building our own workflow.
In this guide, we will create a workflow in Pipedream that does the following things:
The whole process will take about 5 minutes. Let's jump right in.
If you haven't already, sign up for Pipedream. Now, go ahead and create a new workflow. In the first step, we need to specify a trigger, i.e., the event which will run our workflow. Select the HTTP API one.
Now Pipedream will assign a URL that will trigger the workflow. You can also choose other events such as the schedule trigger to execute the workflow after a given time interval.
We will fetch the tweets in this step. Click the + button to add the next step and select the Twitter app.
We will use the Standard Search event for this workflow.
In the auth section, go ahead and authenticate the Twitter app. Pipedream keeps your credentials encrypted, and you can revoke them anytime. Once your Twitter is connected, specify the search keyword, language, and count parameters as follows:
Pipedream will prompt you to deploy the workflow. Deploy it and then click the send a test event button to execute the workflow. As you can see, we have received the tweets.
We need to integrate RapidAPI now. First, click the + button to add a new step. Then search for RapidAPI
and choose the Run Node.js code with RapidAPI event.
Now, head over to Text Analysis API on RapidAPI Hub and subscribe to it. You will see your API key in a field named X-RapidAPI-Key
; copy it.
Go back to your workflow and connect RapidAPI using the key.
Now we will send requests to the API for analyzing the tweets. Remember we can write any custom Node.js code in these steps? That is what we will do here.
We can easily access the data returned from the previous step as steps.search_twitter.$return_value
. Also, our API key is now safely stored in auths.rapidapi
. To use any npm package, you can simply import it, and Pipedream will install it automatically.
I coded the following snippet, which sends an API request for every tweet received in the previous step:
js
let axios = require('axios').default;let responseArray = [];for (let i = 0; i < steps.search_twitter.$return_value.statuses.length; i++) {const options = {method: 'POST',url: 'https://text-analysis12.p.rapidapi.com/sentiment-analysis/api/v1.1',headers: {'content-type': 'application/json','x-rapidapi-host': 'text-analysis12.p.rapidapi.com','x-rapidapi-key': auths.rapidapi},data: {language: 'english',text: steps.search_twitter.$return_value.statuses[i].full_text}};try {let response = await axios(options);responseArray.push(response.data);console.log(responseArray);} catch (error) {console.error(error.response);}}return responseArray;
With all that set, test the workflow again. You can see that our API is working and analyzing all the tweets for their sentiments.
Finally, we can create another step to do something with these results. Let's send these results to a Google Sheet. Create a new step, select the Google Sheets App and choose the Add Multiple Rows action.
After connecting it with your Google Drive account, you can send the data to the specified Sheet. As you can see in the screenshot below, the analyzed tweets are exported to my Sheet whenever I execute this workflow.
Our workflow is ready. You can check the code and try it here in the RapidAPI - Tweet Analysis Workflow.
Pipedream offers a quick and convenient tool to automate tasks, albeit keeping control over them. Combine it with the countless APIs available at RapidAPI Hub, and you have a powerful solution for just about any implementation.