DocumentCloud and MuckRock API New Releases

DocumentCloud’s all-new user interface is live for everyone. The new version is faster, more accessible and able to render documents sharper than ever. Try it out and use the “Feedback” button to tell us what you think.

Our Push to IPFS/Filecoin Add-On lets users upload documents to the IPFS/Filecoin networks for long-term preservation. In the case of users with very large projects, however, runtime and error rates become a concern, as the Add-On might not complete in time to upload the large set.

A new Add-On - the IPFS/Filecoin Batch Uploader - allows users to upload large sets of documents in scheduled batches, minimizing the risk of failures and the amount of human intervention in the large scale upload.

MuckRock Requests

MuckRock has a new version of the MuckRock API, version 2, which is rewritten from the ground up.

Instead of relying on request tokens found on your MuckRock profile page, version 2 uses the same authentication scheme as the DocumentCloud API. The use of access and refresh tokens come from MuckRock Accounts, allowing you to do initial authentication with just your username and password.

When rewriting the API, we took into account the integration of authentication to match the DocumentCloud API, performance, improved documentation, better testing and quality control.

MuckRock Accounts

We created python-squarelet, a library that handles authentication for the DocumentCloud and MuckRock APIs. It can manage the full array of request handling: authentication, automatic retries, error handling, customizable request headers and rate limiting.

Both python-documentcloud, the Python wrapper for the DocumentCloud API, and its soon-to-be sibling, python-muckrock (a wrapper for the latest MuckRock requests API), will depend on python-squarelet to handle authentication and provide a template for request handling.