Move an archive page into your own JSONL pipeline

Build a bounded Reddit data pipeline from historical GET responses. An apacheairflow page-three example, local JSONL writing and request costs without live feeds.

Get API key

Request example

cURL

curl --fail-with-body -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.redditdatastream.com/v1/posts?subreddit=apacheairflow&limit=3&page=3"

Extract a historical page, not a live event stream

Reddit Data Stream gives ETL pipeline owners read access to an independent historical Reddit archive. It is not official or affiliated with Reddit and does not provide live updates, SSE, WebSocket subscriptions or a changefeed. Each GET returns a separate JSON response. Scheduling another task makes another archive request; it does not subscribe to future Reddit activity, deletions or updates.

The destination in this workflow is a JSONL file that your code creates locally. The API does not supply a streaming export endpoint or a ready-made JSONL download. Keep extraction, transformation and file publication as distinct steps so a local write failure is distinguishable from an archive request failure. Your scheduler, storage and downstream processing remain your own responsibilities rather than managed features of the archive.

Records and fields may be missing; complete coverage, a fixed schema, immutable results and permanent availability are not guaranteed. A local progress marker documents your own work, not an archive-issued resume token. Fetching the same page again need not return the same records or order. Local deduplication can examine received records but cannot establish a lossless, duplicate-free extraction of the entire archive.

Inspect page three before producing any lines

Use GET https://api.redditdatastream.com/v1/posts?subreddit=apacheairflow&limit=3&page=3. subreddit=apacheairflow restricts the community, limit=3 requests at most three posts and page=3 requests the third page under those parameters. It does not fetch three pages or continue after a chronological event offset. Authenticate from your server with X-API-Key: <key> or Authorization: Bearer <key>; both formats accept this domain's archive key.

Synthetic response excerpt for demonstration only: {"data":[],"pagination":{"page":3,"limit":3,"total":null,"relation":"unknown"},"credits":{"cost":1,"balance":99}}. No real request produced it and the balance is fictional. An empty deeper page cannot establish an exact query total of zero. This successful empty retrieval costs one credit. It contributes no data lines to your local JSONL file; that is different from receiving no response because of a transport failure.

After a real successful response, validate data as an array and inspect each record before writing. For JSONL, serialize each record as one JSON value followed by a line break; embedded newlines in source text must be escaped by the JSON serializer. Do not split raw post text into lines or write the entire response envelope as though it were a post. Save pagination and credits separately as local processing metadata if needed.

Bound the job and account for remote success

Content limit and page range from 1 to 100, with a separate call for each page. Internal _doc order is not chronology, relevance, score or ingestion time. The last record's created_utc is not a reliable resume watermark. Read total with relation: eq means exact for the query, gte a lower bound and unknown unreliable or null. Page traversal and date partitioning do not prove exhaustive collection.

Every successful retrieval, including empty pages and successful repeats, costs one credit: $1 per 1000 requests. Invalid requests do not debit; upstream failures refund reservations. A client timeout can conceal a charged success, and a local JSONL write failure does not reverse it. Another successful remote attempt costs another credit, even if your loader later excludes duplicate rows.

Signup uses email and a password of 12–72 UTF-8 bytes and displays the key once immediately before payment. Conditional 100 trial credits depend on network-wide anti-abuse eligibility. Minimum paid top-up is $50 for 50000 credits, without subscriptions or expiry for paid credits. Read documentation, pricing, the key page and the batch guide. Public status is free and keyless but does not establish search health, file completeness or account balance.