Post to Dev.to

Reelspan publishes articles to your Dev.to account from Markdown. Dev.to takes text posts only: send them with Post text.

What you can post

The title is devto_title, else the first line of the caption, up to 250 characters. The body is devto_description, else description, else the whole caption (its first line included).

The cleanest request sends the article's title as title and the Markdown body as description. If you send devto_title, the caption becomes that title too, so the body must come from devto_description or description.

Videos and photos can't be sent: Dev.to's API takes no uploads, and the request is refused with UNSUPPORTED_POST_TYPE. To show an image, link one already online in the Markdown.

The result's url is the article on dev.to and post_id its id.

Connect your account

You need an API key. Setup takes about a minute.

1. On dev.to, open Settings → Extensions and scroll to DEV Community API Keys.
2. Describe it as Reelspan and click Generate API Key.
3. In the Reelspan dashboard, open Accounts → Connect account, choose the profile and Dev.to, and paste the key.

Reelspan checks the key with Dev.to before saving it, encrypted.

With the API

curl -X POST https://api.reelspan.com/v1/accounts/devto \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $REELSPAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"profile_username": "my-brand", "api_key": "..."}'

import { Reelspan } from 'reelspan';

const reelspan = new Reelspan();
await reelspan.accounts.connect('my-brand', 'devto', { api_key: process.env.DEVTO_API_KEY });

import os
from reelspan import Reelspan

reelspan = Reelspan()
reelspan.accounts.connect("my-brand", "devto", api_key=os.environ["DEVTO_API_KEY"])

{ "success": true, "platform": "devto", "account": "@yourname", "reconnected": false }

Connecting again replaces the Dev.to account on that profile. See Connect with credentials.

Example post

An article with tags and a canonical URL:

curl -X POST https://api.reelspan.com/v1/posts/text \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $REELSPAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "user": "my-brand",
    "platform": ["devto"],
    "title": "How we cut our build time in half",
    "description": "## The problem\n\nOur CI took 14 minutes...\n\n## What we changed\n\n...",
    "devto_tags": "devops, ci, webdev",
    "devto_canonical_url": "https://example.com/blog/faster-builds"
  }'

import { Reelspan } from 'reelspan';
import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';

const reelspan = new Reelspan();
const post = await reelspan.posts.text({
  user: 'my-brand',
  platforms: ['devto'],
  title: 'How we cut our build time in half',
  description: await readFile('faster-builds.md', 'utf8'),
  extra: { devto_tags: 'devops, ci, webdev', devto_canonical_url: 'https://example.com/blog/faster-builds' },
});

from pathlib import Path
from reelspan import Reelspan

reelspan = Reelspan()
post = reelspan.posts.text(
    "my-brand", ["devto"], "How we cut our build time in half",
    description=Path("faster-builds.md").read_text(),
    extra={"devto_tags": "devops, ci, webdev", "devto_canonical_url": "https://example.com/blog/faster-builds"},
)

Fields

In the dashboard composer, the Dev.to tab has Tags, Canonical URL and Save as a draft.

Limits and behaviour

• Tags: 4 per article. With more, the first 4 are used and the result carries a warning.
• Title: up to 250 characters; longer is cut.
• Drafts: a draft answers with a warning, "Saved as a draft on Dev.to".
• No first comment: a first_comment isn't posted; the result says "first_comment": "unsupported" with a warning.
• Analytics: reactions, comments and, when Dev.to returns them, page views per article. See Analytics.

Common errors

Errors when connecting come back as a 400 with the code in error_code. UNSUPPORTED_POST_TYPE refuses the whole request with a 400. Errors when posting are in that network's result. See Errors.