following-list

A simple demo script: Information about who you're following

The end result of this tutorial is a script that'll list out who you're following, showing who you're mutuals with and when they last posted.

Install dependencies

If you followed along from the example folder README, you're halfway there.

Once Composer is installed, we'll want to create a folder for our project. Make a folder anywhere, such as in your local Documents folder, and then go there in Terminal (or PowerShell on Windows). If you used your Documents folder and made a new folder there, then the command to go there will be cd ~/Documents/your-folder-name-here

When you're inside that new project folder, run composer require tumblr/tumblr in Terminal (or PowerShell) to install the official PHP Tumblr API client. Then, create a new file for our demonstration script, named following.php, and open that in a text editor of some kind. At Tumblr, we like PHPStorm (paid) and Visual Studio Code (free) a lot, but any "plain text" editor will do. (Note that text editors like Microsoft Word or Google Docs are not "plain text", so they won't necessarily work.)

Creating our script

The first thing to do in your new following.php file is to just "echo" something to make sure PHP is working. So just put in:

<?php

echo 'hello!';

... and save the file, and in Terminal (or PowerShell), type in php following.php and press Enter/Return, and you should see "hello!" – congratulations, you just wrote a PHP script!

From here, we need to import our Composer packages, of which Tumblr's API client is included, so replace everything in the "following.php" file with:

<?php

// this loads our tumblr.php library automagically
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

... and now let's set up the Tumblr API client itself, so we can start asking Tumblr for information. After the above four lines, add these:

$consumer_key = ''; // put your consumer key between the ‘'
$consumer_secret = ''; // put your consumer secret between the ‘'
$token_key = ''; // put your token between the ‘'
$token_secret = ''; // put your token secret between the ‘'

$tumblr = new \Tumblr\API\Client($consumer_key, $consumer_secret, $token_key, $token_secret);

... and fill all of that information out as described. There's an example of the kinds of data this expects in the User Info console page.

And now let's add to the end of the file our first actual call to the Tumblr API:

$blogs_response = $tumblr->getFollowedBlogs();
foreach ($blogs_response->blogs as $blog) {
    echo "{$blog->url}\n";
}

... and if you run php following.php now, you'll likely get a list of blog URLs you're following, which is actually the first "page" of who you're following on Tumblr. Congratulations, you've just used the Tumblr API!

From here, you'll have to learn PHP, our PHP client library, and the Tumblr API endpoints and fields to do more.

As a bigger, more complete example, in this folder is a more complete following.php script you can run, as promised at the start of this guide. Copy that script somewhere, run the composer install as described at the top of the file, and run php following.php help for more information on what it can do!