Over the last few articles, I’ve demonstrated various techniques for consuming REST API data in your PowerShell code. Let’s wrap up this discussion with a few more examples, beginning with a way to discover how to use a given REST API.

Swagger and OpenAPI

API developers have many tools at their disposal for documenting the API. The documentation is often published on the site as a JSON file, although YAML is also an option. On older sites, you might find them using a specification called Swagger. This has been superseded by a specification called OpenAPI. Using either specification is not required, and it isn’t always easy for a consumer to discover what is being used.

In researching this series, I came across a site that is a collection of public API documentation. I am eventually going to use the OMDB API, which I can also find here. If you go to https://apis.guru, you can search for omdb.