Looking up posts in the Bluesky API

Install the atproto package, construct a client with your username/password, then call the get_post_thread method with your at:// URI.

I wanted to use the Bluesky API to get some basic information about posts. It wasn’t difficult, but there were a couple of non-obvious steps I wanted to note.

1. Install the atproto package:

   $ pip install atproto
   

2. Create an authentication session:

   from atproto import Client
       
   client = Client()
   client.login(username, password)
   

   The username needs to be a full domain name, e.g. alexwlchan.bsky.social – I initially tried just alexwlchan, but that doesn’t work.

   You can use your regular Bluesky account password, but it also supports per-app passwords, so I used one of those instead.

3. Call the get_post_thread method. This method includes information about the replies and parents, but I’m just interested in a single post:

   api_resp = client.get_post_thread(
       uri="at://discobooks.bsky.social/app.bsky.feed.post/3lvgbcnv5vs2a",
       depth=0,
       parent_height=0
   )
   

   The URI needs to be an at:// URI, which is a URI scheme specific to ATProto. I don’t understand all the possibilities; I just based this on an example I found elsewhere in the docs.

4. Interpret the API response. The API docs have a loose description of the output, but I found it more helpful to dump the response as JSON and inspect it by hand:

   print(api_resp.model_dump_json(indent=2))
   

   This allowed me to find the fields I wanted, and extract them into a simpler structure:

   from datetime import datetime
       
   post = api_resp.thread.post
       
   my_data = {
       "author": post.author.handle,
       "date_posted": datetime.fromisoformat(post.record.created_at),
       "text": post.record.text,
   }
       
   pprint(my_data)
   

   Here’s an example of the output this prints:

   {'author': 'discobooks.bsky.social',
    'date_posted': datetime.datetime(2025, 8, 2, 13, 26, 8, 603000, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc),
    'text': 'My partner just uttered the most loving words a person can utter:\n'
            '\n'
            '“You have too many books. They’re all over the place. \n'
            'I’m gonna buy you a new bookcase.”\n'
            '\n'
            'He’s a good man Savannah, a GOOD MAN.'}