Publish to medium via API

Photo by Gabriel Gusmao on Unsplash

I usually wrote blog using markdown in my own gatsby site, it is a very smooth process. However, when I want to my blog sync to medium, it becomes a pain point. Medium is a html based content format. And I have to manually copy my markdown format to there, and manually modify all the format. For every 5-minute article, it will take me around 10-minute to finish. But after that the two articles become detached, which means if one of the side changed, the other side will not be changed. I have to manually sync them, it is a totally pain.

I am trying to fix the issue, but so far it is only half done, I can sync when creation but I cannot sync when updating. the approach I am using is through the official API.

In this article, I am going to walk through the API, and hopefully sync this article to medium to be the first one I sync automatically.

1st step: Get the token

To do the job, we have to get a security token, which can be achieved by two ways as below:

1. From Medium settings web page, and get the integration token
2. OAuth2 workflow but only for existing medium app

Obviously, I will choose the 1st way. it is very easy to do that just copy the integration token.

2nd step: Get My own information

The main purpose of this task is to get the user id, which will be used later.

curl --oauth2-bearer {token} https://api.medium.com/v1/me

and it will return the following stuff:

{
   "data":{
      "id":"12xxx222222", // <-- this is the userId will be used later
      "username":"ron-liu",
      "name":"Ron Liu",
      "url":"https://medium.com/@ron-liu",
      "imageUrl":"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/fit/c/400/400/1*p7d2zeD6NBSADK36SmLkyw@2x.jpeg"
   }
}

Step 3: Create a Post

curl --oauth2-bearer {token}  --data '{ 
 "title": "Test post via api", \n "contentFormat": "markdown", \n "content": "## Hello World 
 I am posting 1st blog using api" \n}' \n-X POST https://api.medium.com/v1/users/{userId}/posts

So far so good, but the official blog didn’t provide a update endpoint. So currently I don’t know how to update a post programmably.