public-apis is the open-source phone book for developers, a community-maintained index of around 1,400 free APIs across weather, finance, geocoding, music, sports, machine learning, and everything else you might want to call from a side project. Browse the categories, copy a URL, and you’re sending a real request in under a minute.
- 452,472 stars
- 49,825 forks
- Python
- MIT License
The structure is the value
Every entry sits in a single sortable table with four columns: API name, description, Auth required (None / apiKey / OAuth), and HTTPS support. That’s it. No popularity sorting, no “sponsored” placements inside the list: just a flat, alphabetical-by-category index you can scan in one go. Categories range from the obvious (Animals, Weather, Finance) to the niche (Government, Open Data, Open Source Projects), each linking out to the API’s official docs.
The curation rule is strict: free-tier only, no trial-limited APIs, no credit-card-required signups. That’s the line that’s kept it useful since 2016 while every other “awesome-apis” list has decayed into freemium noise.
The README you’ll see is not the list
The repo’s README opens with a heavy APILayer commercial section (the repo was acquired by APILayer in 2023). Skip past it. The actual index is in README.md further down: the table of ~1,400 APIs is the whole point. If you read the top of the page and conclude “this is just an APILayer ad,” you’ve stopped one screen too early.
The maintainers have kept the core list independent of the APILayer layer above it, and the community PRs still flow on the merit of the APIs themselves. Treat the commercial section as the cost of the repo staying alive, not as the content.
How people actually use it
Most workflows look the same: jump to the GitHub README, Ctrl-F the category you need, open three candidate APIs in tabs, and test the simplest one with a single curl against the doc’d endpoint. Auth column matters here. If you’re prototyping in a hackathon, filter for No auth first to skip email-confirmation delays. For production prototypes, apiKey-auth APIs are usually fine if the free-tier rate limit holds.
The repo is mirrored on a dedicated docs site at apis.tentangle.dev and several community forks render it as a searchable UI, but the canonical list is still the GitHub README. That’s where PRs land and where the maintainers actually review.
Run it
You don’t clone public-apis to use it. You read it. The README is the product. If you want a local searchable copy:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis.git
cd public-apis
grep -i "weather" README.mdpublic-apis is the first stop when a project needs a third-party data source and you don’t want to register a credit card. Bookmark the README, ignore the APILayer top section, and contribute back when you find a dead link. That’s how it’s stayed alive for nine years.