Explore the Power of Fixer.io API

Fixer.io API is a public API that allows developers to access foreign exchange rates and currency conversion data. It's a great resource for developers working with international finance, e-commerce, and travel. In this blog post, we'll walk through the basics of the API and how to use it, with JavaScript code examples.

Getting Started

Before you start using the Fixer.io API, you need to sign up for a free API key. This key is used to access the API and authenticate your requests. Once you have your key, you can start making requests to the API endpoints.

API Endpoints

Fixer.io API provides two main endpoints:

• Latest Forex Rates
• Historical Forex Rates

The endpoints are accessed via HTTP GET requests.

Latest Forex Rates

The latest forex rates endpoint allows you to retrieve the latest exchange rates for a given currency. Here is an example code snippet in JavaScript to retrieve the latest exchange rate for USD (US Dollar):

const url = "http://data.fixer.io/api/latest?access_key=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY&base=USD";
fetch(url)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => console.log(data.rates));

In this example, we use the fetch() method to send a GET request to the latest exchange rates endpoint, including our API key and the base currency as parameters. The response is in JSON format, and we use the .then() method to print the rates to the console.

Historical Forex Rates

The historical forex rates endpoint allows you to retrieve exchange rates for a specific day in the past. Here is an example code snippet in JavaScript to retrieve the exchange rates for EUR (Euro) for January 1st, 2021:

const url = "http://data.fixer.io/api/2021-01-01?access_key=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY&base=EUR";
fetch(url)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => console.log(data.rates));

In this example, we use the same method as the latest forex rates, but we replace the endpoint URL with the date we want to retrieve, in this case, January 1st, 2021. We also set the base currency to EUR.

Conclusion

Fixer.io API is a powerful tool that offers easy access to currency conversion data. In this blog post, we walked through the basic API endpoints and showed you how to use them in JavaScript, with example code snippets. Start exploring the possibilities of the API and see what you can do!