Mikkel Høgh

Coding the web since 1999

15 Sep 2009

How to get your Disqus API keys

I’m working on importing my comments into the otherwise excellent Disqus commenting system, but getting ahold of your API keys can be rather difficult, so I’ll just document the process here for later reference.

To call the API functions, I’m using the Java-based REST Client – which is free and very handy for this kind of thing.

  1. Log in to Disqus.com with a user that has access to the forum you want API keys for.
  2. Visit http://disqus.com/api/get_my_key/ with your browser to get the user API key (since it uses the active session to give you the API key).
  3. Call http://disqus.com/api/get_forum_list/?user_api_key=_USER_API_KEY_ to get the list of available forums, since you’ll need the numeric identifier for the forum. Look through the JSON response and find the id number for the forum you want an API key for (for my blog, it’s "id": "180233").
  4. Call http://disqus.com/api/get_forum_api_key/?user_api_key=_USER_API_KEY_&forum_id=180233 where 180233 is your forum id. The message field in the JSON response should contain your API key.

That’s quite a bit of manual work, but it does not seem like there’s currently any better method. If you happen to find one, please let me know.