Search for podcasts by term using the Podcast Index API
domain: podcastindex.org · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Register for a free Podcast Index API account to obtain an API key and API secret.
Record the current UTC time as a Unix epoch timestamp (integer seconds).
Compute an authentication hash by concatenating your API key, API secret, and the timestamp string, then computing the SHA-1 digest of that concatenated string.
Send a GET request to the search-by-term endpoint with q as the search query parameter.
Include three headers: X-Auth-Key (your API key), X-Auth-Date (the epoch timestamp as a string), and Authorization (the SHA-1 hex digest computed in step 3).
Parse the feeds array in the JSON response for podcast metadata including title, url, image, and itunesId.
Known gotchas
The Authorization header value is the raw SHA-1 hex digest — there is no 'X-Auth-Hash' header; using that name will result in authentication failure.
The timestamp in X-Auth-Date must be within a few minutes of the Podcast Index server's current time; stale timestamps are rejected, so generate a fresh timestamp per request.
The SHA-1 input is a plain concatenation of apiKey + apiSecret + timestamp with no separators or additional characters.
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