Quickstart

This is for version 0.9.0 and below. The documentation for v1.0.0+ can be found here

Adding the Dependency

JRAW is hosted on Bintray's jCenter.

Gradle:

repositories {
    jcenter()
}

dependencies {
    compile "net.dean.jraw:JRAW:$jrawVersion"
}

Maven:

Add jCenter (https://jcenter.bintray.com) to your repositories and then add the dependency to the pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.dean.jraw</groupId>
    <artifactId>JRAW</artifactId>
    <version>${jraw.version}</version>
</dependency>

Choosing a User-Agent

The first step in using the Reddit API effectively is making sure you're sending a descriptive User-Agent header. This allows Reddit to block buggy versions of your app while not affecting others. An effective User-Agent consists of four parts:

1. The target platform
2. A unique ID (usually your package)
3. A version
4. A reddit username.

A UserAgent for a script named "Awesome Script" could look like this:

UserAgent myUserAgent = UserAgent.of("desktop", "net.dean.awesomescript", "v0.1", "thatJavaNerd");

Authentication

Now we can create a RedditClient:

RedditClient redditClient = new RedditClient(myUserAgent);

Because reddit uses OAuth2, this RedditClient will need to be authenticated before it can do anything useful. Fortunately, RedditClient comes with a helper class: OAuthHelper. This guide will assume you picked a script app, since those are the easiest to authenticate. If you need to use a web or installed app, see the OAuth2 page.

The first thing we need to do is get our credentials in order. JRAW comes with a Credentials class to help us organize everything.

Credentials credentials = Credentials.script("<username>", "<password>", "<clientId>", "<clientSecret>");

To use this data, we need to use the RedditClient's OAuthHelper. Since the Credentials we created was for a script, we can make use of OAuthHelper's easyAuth(Credentials) method.

OAuthData authData = redditClient.getOAuthHelper().easyAuth(credentials);

Finally, we can notify the RedditClient that we have been authorized.

redditClient.authenticate(authData);

Now we are fully authorized and are able to make requests to the API successfully! To test it out, try redditClient.me().

Note that you will need to renew your access token after one hour. To do this, see the OAuth2 page.