Depreciating My First Package

Update: The replapi-it package has been passed on to a new owner! @PikachuB2005 now has their own package on the v3 line and chooses to maintain it. It is not related to the previous ReplAPI.it or the ReplAPI.it Project.

Some time ago, I created a post on Dev.to about creating my first package, a NodeJS API for the online IDE Replit. Over the years my skills increased, the knowledgebase increase, and ReplAPI.it got better. We shifted from adding every part of the APIs to creating a package that allows for users to get the data they need without struggling through documentation and ideologies. The package was depreciated.

Why?

The Replit API is crazy and constantly changing, and in our efforts to put every part of it at the disposal of our users we set ourselves up for failure. Every week there was some new error, some change to the site, some new query that threw a wrench in our plans. The situation was somewhat similar to that faced by the Discord.py devs. We were blind to everything unless someone asked on the Discord Server. In fact our project was never sponsored (or acknowledged for that matter) by anyone on the Replit team. It became a bit of a pain to manage the package, and attempts to make the process easier and DRYer only made the codebase shift more insane.

Now What?

Well at the current state, the package is unusable and there are no plans by myself to update it. Some community members have used it as a base to create their own versions which I whole-heartedly support. I don't intend on passing the package itself on NPM over to just anyone, but if you update the package to work with the current problems faced by developers then feel free to shoot me an email.

If you want to use the Replit API at it's current state there are a few hurdles. Firstly you need an HTTPS package because the staging domain that allowed HTTP is down and the main site requires HTTPS. The API endpoint is at https://replit.com/graphql. Secondly, you need a schema. You can find some of it by look in DevTools in Network Requests, reverse-engineer the ReplAPI.it package, or obtain a copy of the schema from some benevolent member of the Replit Team (or Replit Mods). With these two in hand you can create your own projects with the API.