TLDR : Pass user agent when sending requests to NPS API.
Huge fan of national parks in the US. I thought it would be fun to work with some of the data they have, luckily they have an API service. Registered an account, it had good documentation, and was easy to use except for one problem. It was returning HTTP 403 error, for all except one route.
I started working on building a GraphQL wrapper API and consume it in a React app later on. I started with python's FastAPI, but soon ran into problem passing GraphQL variables which it didnt like / I couldnt get it to work.
I turned to Javascript, setup an environment to use apollo-server. I need to call a rest API, apollo has a package built for this - apollo-datasource-rest. Cool. I started building the API, everthing worked good so far, for the first route /activities. I added the next route and I get hit with the 403 error from NPS API service, I couldnt figure out what was causing this. I run the service through Postman, data is returned, everything is fine there. I turn back to Python for a bit, add mapping for the route that didnt work, mysteriously the route worked fine on Python. I debated moving back to Python, but I didnt have the capability or knowledge to fix the issues that I had faced earlier. Back to Node. I probably spent around 10 hours, trying to figure out this one issue. I even sent an email from NPS API contact page, didnt get reply. At this point, I tried all combinations I could think of. I moved api key from URL to setting it in header. Open URL in browser, it seemed to work fine(Honestly, this was the clue I didnt catch on). Nothing worked, I gave up for a day and went back to playing video games.
Out of fluke/luck, I add user-agent header to the outgoing API request, and voila it worked! I got back useful data. I can get back to deving.
I am guessing, node-fetch request doesnt add any user-agent to the request. Python's request library adds a default UA string if nothing is specified.
The user agent that worked for me - "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36"