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The Guardian API

The Guardian's Open Platform (Content API) provides searchable access to Guardian articles, tags, and sections dating back to 1999. Use this connector to pull content from The Guardian's catalog into Nexla for analysis, enrichment, and downstream integration.

The Guardian API icon

Power end-to-end data operations for your The Guardian API API with Nexla. Our bi-directional The Guardian API connector is purpose-built for The Guardian API, making it simple to ingest data, sync it across systems, and deliver it anywhere — all with no coding required. Nexla turns API-sourced data into ready-to-use, reusable data products and makes it easy to send data to The Guardian API or any other destination. With comprehensive monitoring, lineage tracking, and access controls, Nexla keeps your The Guardian API workflows fast, secure, and fully governed.

Features

Type: API

SourceDestination

  • Seamless API Integration: Connect to any endpoint as source or destination without coding, with automatic data product creation
  • Visual Composition & Chaining: Build complex integrations using visual templates, chain API calls, and compose workflows with data validation and filtering
  • API Proxy: Expose curated slices of your data securely with a secure and customizable API proxy that validates and transforms data on the fly
  • Request optimization with intelligent batching, retry, and caching to minimize API calls and costs

Prerequisites​

Before creating a The Guardian API credential, you need an API key from The Guardian's Open Platform. The Guardian Content API uses API key authentication for all requests.

To obtain your API key, follow these steps:

  1. Go to The Guardian Open Platform access page at open-platform.theguardian.com/access.

  2. Register for a developer key by submitting the short registration form with your email address and a brief description of your project. The developer key is free and is intended for personal projects, research, and testing.

  3. Your API key is issued immediately after registration. Copy and store it securely, as you will need it to configure your Nexla credential.

The free developer tier is rate-limited (approximately 12 calls per second and 5,000 calls per day). If you intend to build a commercial application, contact The Guardian to discuss their commercial licensing tier. For full details on registration, rate limits, and available content, see the Guardian Open Platform documentation.

Authenticate​

Credentials required​

FieldRequiredSecretDescription
API KeyYesYesAPI key for The Guardian API.

Create a credential in Nexla​

  1. After selecting the data source type, click the Add Credential tile to open the Add New Credential overlay.

  2. Enter a name for the credential in the Credential Name field and a short, meaningful description in the Credential Description field.

  3. Enter your Guardian Open Platform API key in the API Key field. This is the developer key you obtained in Prerequisites and is used to authenticate all requests to The Guardian Content API.

    Your API key is sensitive information and should be kept confidential. If your key is compromised, register for a new developer key on The Guardian Open Platform and update your Nexla credential.

    For detailed information about API authentication and available content, see the Guardian Open Platform documentation.

  4. Click the Save button at the bottom of the overlay. The newly added credential will now appear in a tile on the Authenticate screen during data source creation.

Use as a data source​

To create a new data flow, navigate to the Integrate section, and click the New Data Flow button. Select the The Guardian API connector tile, then select the credential that will be used to connect to The Guardian API, and click Next; or, create a new The Guardian API credential for use in this flow.

Endpoint templates​

Nexla provides pre-built templates that can be used to rapidly configure data sources to ingest data from common The Guardian API endpoints. Select the endpoint from which this source will fetch data from the Endpoint pulldown menu. Available endpoint templates are listed in the expandable boxes below.

List Content

Retrieve content from The Guardian API.

  • This endpoint returns Guardian content items, such as articles, from the Content API. Results are returned as paginated JSON, and Nexla automatically follows pagination to retrieve subsequent pages of data.

For detailed information about the content endpoint, request parameters, and response structure, see the Guardian Open Platform documentation.

Once the selected endpoint template has been configured, click the Test button to the right of the endpoint selection menu to retrieve a sample of the data that will be fetched. Sample data will be displayed in the Endpoint Test Result panel on the right, allowing you to verify that the source is configured correctly before saving.

Manual configuration​

The Guardian API data sources can also be manually configured to ingest data from any valid Guardian Content API endpoint, including endpoints not covered by the pre-built template, chained API calls, or custom request parameters. Select the Advanced tab at the top of the configuration screen, and follow the instructions in Connect to Any API to configure the API method, endpoint URL, date/time and lookup macros, path to data, metadata, and request headers.

Once all of the relevant settings have been configured, click the Create button in the upper right corner of the screen to save and create the new The Guardian API data source. Nexla will now begin ingesting data from the configured endpoint and will organize any data that it finds into one or more Nexsets.