api-integration_skill

Overview

This skill helps integrate external REST APIs into a multi-tenant TypeScript blog platform with secure authentication, rate limiting, error handling, and caching patterns. It focuses on building resilient API clients, protecting secrets, and reducing latency and costs through smart retries and caching. Use it to standardize third-party data access across tenants and features.

How this skill works

The skill provides patterns for loading secrets safely, composing authenticated HTTP requests, and wrapping calls with retry, exponential backoff, and rate-limit awareness. It includes caching strategies (TTL-based), pagination handling, and common error-handling flows for HTTP status codes and network failures. Implementations are language-agnostic but mapped to TypeScript best practices for client wrappers and middleware.

When to use it

• Fetching third-party data for posts, analytics, or enrichments in a multi-tenant blog
• Building reusable API client modules or wrappers for external services
• Protecting and rotating API keys and other credentials
• Preventing tenant spikes from triggering provider rate limits
• Improving reliability with retries, backoff, and structured error handling

Best practices

• Keep credentials out of source; load from environment or a secure secret store at runtime
• Implement retries with exponential backoff and limit total retry time
• Respect provider rate-limit headers and apply client-side throttling per tenant
• Cache safe-to-cache responses with TTL and invalidate on updates
• Log requests and errors without recording secrets or sensitive tenant data

Example use cases

• Server-side job that enriches blog posts with metadata from an external content API while caching results per slug
• Multi-tenant webhook consumer that validates signatures, queues processing, and rate-limits downstream API calls per tenant
• Admin dashboard fetching paginated analytics from a provider with a client that transparently paginates and caches results
• Background sync that retries transient failures with exponential backoff and records metrics for monitoring
• Batch import that respects x-ratelimit headers and spaces requests to avoid 429 responses