Personal project · 2026
LIVE
API Playground
An interactive API-request sandbox for people who've never called an API before: built-in sample APIs, bring-your-own APIs with plain-language test fields, a response viewer, guided walkthroughs, and solo/versus challenges.
01Why it exists
Built for whenever the mood strikes.
API Playground exists for the moments you are a little curious and a little bored — you do not need a project, a plan, or even a reason. Open a sample API, fill in a form, hit run, and see what comes back. That is genuinely the whole point.
Most places that teach APIs assume you already know why you are there. I do not. Come in with nothing but "I wonder what this does" and you will leave having actually run a real request against a real server — not read about one.
If you want more structure later, it is here: walkthroughs that explain a concept and then have you run it yourself, a history of everything you have tried, and challenges if you would rather race the clock than wander. But none of that is required to get started. Free accounts, sample APIs pre-loaded, no setup.
If you already know what you are building, bring your own API — describe it once with plain-language fields, and it behaves just like the built-in samples from then on.
API Playground exists for the moments you are a little curious and a little bored — you do not need a project, a plan, or even a reason. Open a sample API, fill in a form, hit run, and see what comes back. That is genuinely the whole point.
Most places that teach APIs assume you already know why you are there. I do not. Come in with nothing but "I wonder what this does" and you will leave having actually run a real request against a real server — not read about one.
If you want more structure later, it is here: walkthroughs that explain a concept and then have you run it yourself, a history of everything you have tried, and challenges if you would rather race the clock than wander. But none of that is required to get started. Free accounts, sample APIs pre-loaded, no setup.
If you already know what you are building, bring your own API — describe it once with plain-language fields, and it behaves just like the built-in samples from then on.
02How it works
Slim 4 (PHP) API talks to a React + TypeScript SPA. Every request a user runs goes through a server-side execution engine hardened against SSRF (blocks private IP ranges and pins DNS resolution so a target can't rebind mid-request), so users can safely point it at almost anything. Environments and secrets are encrypted at rest. Deployed to a single cPanel account with no dedicated subdomain, so the whole stack had to be made subpath-aware end to end.
03What I learned
Shared hosting fights you in specific, repeatable ways: a deploy zip built without Unix permission metadata silently breaks vendor/ on every re-upload, and Apache's mod_rewrite adds one REDIRECT_ prefix per internal hop, so a header that looks 'missing' can just be sitting under a different $_SERVER key than expected. Neither shows up until you deploy for real.
Stack
Slim 4 (PHP), React, TypeScript, MySQL