The googleapis organization hosts tools, technical articles, and issues related to Google API design and practice.
Google APIs refers to networked APIs
provided by Google services. Most Google APIs are hosted on the googleapis.com
domain, and support both
REST and
gRPC APIs using
transcoding.
Google APIs are developed as RPC API services defined using Protocol Buffers (proto). Google API specifications are published in the Google APIs repository. External developers can use the published proto files to generate documentation and client libraries or to guide their own API definitions.
To provide great developer experience, Google APIs use a common API Design Guide that encourages a simple and consistent API design philosophy. It also provides solutions to common design issues, such as proper default values for enums and patterns for long-running operations.
The easiest way to call a Google API is with a Google Cloud Client Library. For developers working in languages or environments that we don't currently support, we provide instructions here for calling Google APIs in both REST and RPC forms:
Many Google APIs are supported by client libraries that developers can use to more easily call Google's gRPC and REST APIs. Many of these libraries are generated using toolkit and artman.
The googleapis organization also hosts repositories that contain common code used by Google's generated and handwritten client libraries. Details vary by language, but most provide support for generally-needed features like paging and retry. Currently there is one such library for each of the main languages that we support: gax-dotnet, gax-go, gax-java, gax-nodejs, gax-php, gax-python, and gax-ruby. Note that we consider these to be internal implementation details of our clients and reserve the right to make changes, so if you choose to use them, be sure to refer to tagged versions.
We are also building tools that work with the OpenAPI Specification for REST APIs. gnostic is an extensible front-end for OpenAPI tools that reads OpenAPI descriptions, puts them in an efficient binary representation, and allows efficient plugins and standalone tools to be easily written in any programming language with Protocol Buffer support.
If you have feedback or questions regarding API design or methodology, please file an issue in the googleapis.github.io issues area. For specific tool questions, please file an issue on the corresponding repository. We look forward to hearing from you!