API

Coming soonThis is not available yet. The page below explains what it will be and why it is not open — nothing here can be used or bought today.

There is no API today. No keys exist, nothing is documented, and there is nothing to call. Nobody but me can upload to modsdrop at the moment, so there is nothing an API could be pointed at yet. This page explains what an API on modsdrop would be for and how I am thinking about it. It is a plan, not a product, and nothing on this page is a promise.

I am Máté Geszti. I run modsdrop, and I also run crashmods.com, a mod site with roughly 2,500 mods for BeamNG.drive, Farming Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator 2, GTA 5, Minecraft and The Sims 4. At the moment modsdrop hosts only my own library. Public uploading is not open. That is the main reason there is no API: most of what an API would do is upload files on behalf of somebody who cannot upload here yet.

What an API is for on a file host

If you run a mod site, hosting your downloads somewhere else means doing the same small jobs by hand, over and over. You export the file from your own admin. You open the host in another tab. You upload it. You wait for the virus scan to finish. You copy the file size back into your mod page so the size shown to visitors is not a guess. You paste the link in. Later, when you want to know which of your mods people actually download, you go and look up each file one at a time.

None of that is difficult. It is just repetitive, and it goes wrong quietly. A size gets typed in wrong. A file is replaced on the host but the link on the mod page still points at the old one. A scan result is never checked because checking it means another tab.

An API would remove the tabs. Your own admin would talk to the host directly, so the file, its size, its scan state and its link would come from one action instead of a handful of manual steps. That is the idea. None of it exists here.

The case I know best

crashmods.com and modsdrop are meant to fit together this way eventually. When I publish a mod on crashmods, the file would go to modsdrop from the crashmods admin, and the size and scan state would come back into the mod page on their own. Today I do every part of that by hand, so I am also the person who knows where it hurts. That is useful: I would not be designing for an imagined user.

It also means I will not pretend this would be a general-purpose platform interface. If it is ever built, it would be built for mod sites that host their files here, and I would rather it do a few things properly than many things badly.

What it would likely cover

If an API is built, these are the areas I would start with. They are intentions, not commitments, and they could change before a line of it is written.

• Uploading a file — sending a file from your own system and getting back its page and its download link, without a browser. This depends entirely on public uploading opening first, and public uploading is not open.
• File details — reading back what modsdrop knows about a file: its size, when it was uploaded, and the state of its virus scan, so a mod page could show the same facts the file page shows.
• Download counts — reading how many times files uploaded under an account have been downloaded, so nobody has to check each file page by hand. Accounts do not exist yet either.

Why there are no endpoints listed here

You will not find URLs, parameter names or example code on this page, and that is deliberate. An interface nobody can call is not documentation, it is fiction. If I published names now, they would be wrong by the time anything was built, and somebody would waste an evening writing against them. If there is ever something real to call, the details will be written down against the thing that actually exists.

What is not decided

Quite a lot, honestly:

• Whether an API gets built at all.
• Who would be given keys, and whether that would be open to any site owner or limited at first.
• Whether download counts would be live or updated on a delay — that depends on what the storage and caching layer can take without slowing downloads.
• What the request limits would be. I will not put a number here before I have measured one.
• How keys would behave when a file is removed, or when a takedown request lands.
• Whether it would come with public uploading, after it, or not at all.

What has to happen first

Public uploading has to open, and the accounts and the advertising revenue share planned to go with it have to exist. None of that is built, and I have not fixed a date for any of it. Until then, an API would have exactly one user, and that user is me.

If you would use one

If you run a mod site and you would plug it into a host like this, I would like to hear what you actually need — what your admin already does, and what you keep doing by hand. Tell me through the contact page. I cannot promise what I would build, or when, but I would rather hear the real requirements than guess at them.