## Posting to social media with Curl
To demonstrate how Curl can be utilized in a real-world scenario, here's a quick example of interacting with a platform with Curl.
[Mastodon](
https://joinmastodon.org/) is an open source, federated social network and microblogging platform, and features a rich API to read, write, and manage your account.
Other social networks may have similar features, and while the exact API commands differ from site to site, this provides a reasonable example of the process, and in just three simple steps.
If you want to try this yourself, you must sign up for a Mastodon account (and if you do, be sure to follow the [opensource.com bot](
https://fosstodon.org/@osdc) to see a shell and Curl-based bot in action).
### 0. Create an app
After creating an account on a Mastodon server, you must create an app hosted by your user.
This is done through the website, in the **Development** panel of your user profile.
### 1. Get your API key
After creating a new app, click the app name to see its private credentials.
In this case, your credentials include a client key, a client secret, and an authentication token.
This is common regardless of what API you're using.
There may only be one API key, or there may be several components, but the point is that you've generated a unique and secret hash that you can use in your program or script that you're using to call on the API.
### 2. Learn the API
Learning to talk to an API is exactly the same as learning a new Linux command, or a new [shell](
https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/terminals-shells-consoles), or a new programming language.
You need to come to know what words are used to scructure a command or query, you need to know the syntax, and you need to know what external information you're required to provide.
Generally, if a service provides an API, it also provides (up-to-date, ideally) documentation on how to use the API.
In the case of Mastodon, there's very good documentation on how to interact with your account through the API, so you can learn the language with minimal pain.
### 3. Make a post
According to Mastodon's API documentation, you can test your credentials by sending your authorization token, preceeded by the string "Bearer", as a special header to the API endpoint ``
https://mastodon.example/api/v1/accounts/verify_credentials``.
For example:
```
$ curl --header 'Authorization: Bearer K90yYtm_1fMxH775bw31-775pnPDZvmQWSJzg' \
https://mastodon.example/api/v1/accounts/verify_credentials
```
In return, you get a JSON dump of your user profile.
Other API interactions require more information.
For example, to post a status to your account, you must also provide form data for the ``status`` field:
```
$ curl --header 'Authorization: Bearer K90yYtm_1fMxH775bw31-775pnPDZvmQWSJzg' \
--form "status=Test post from curl" \
"
https://mastodon.xyz/api/v1/statuses"
```
## Using Curl for remote interactions
Coupled with the right API, Curl is almost a network programming language.
It's easy to understand as the courier of your commands, and it has troubleshooting tools built in.
Use Curl the next time you need to test or interact with an API.
