Valorant rank api

I want to expand my hello-world api with some new functionality as the basis for a future discord bot. A good starting point could be retrieving my own rank using Riot's API. Let's get started.

The plan

To build this project, I have a lightweight plan in mind to iterate as I go and prove assumptions.

1. Research where I can gather this information
   • Make some test calls to the API. See how it behaves.
2. Implement a lambda which calls the API
   • Make a stub which returns content in the desired state. Test.
   • Add an integration to the API. Exclude any necessary authentication if possible. Test.
3. Implement authentication for the API

The research

First I'll need to understand where I can retrieve this data by looking through the Riot APIs on their developer portal. I want to get a rank for a given user.

I first looked in the ranked api but it appears this is strictly for the leaderboard which doesn't offer me the info I'm looking for. Instead it looks like I'll need to use the matches api which provides an int competitiveTier for all the players in a given match. Combining this with the getMatchlist API I can take the most recent match and return a rank for a given player!

note: credit to this article for giving some inspiration to look into the match result output.

Lastly I'll need a puuid to fetch data for a specific user. Looks like I'll need to fetch the user with the getByRiotId account API.

The overall flow should look something like:

Given a tagLine and gameName:

1. Call the getByRiotId API to retrieve a puuid
2. Use the puuid to fetch recent matches for the user
3. Take the most recent match and extract the competitiveTier for the user
4. Return the competitive tier mapped to the in-game name of the rank

The work

First I want to have a request with minimal parameters -- otherwise known as the happy path. Let's look at the documentation around the account API to see how we can invoke it docs. It looks like I'll have to register an account and get a development API key to test it out.

I registered and received some development api key. Now I can select this in the dropdown on their page and submit a sample request using my gameName and tagLine. I was able to make a sample request and got back a 200 response with the expected payload. This request shows me a number of things that will be useful for my implementation:

• The endpoint used for Americas is https://americas.api.riotgames.com
• The X-Riot-Token is the header which carries my API key
• The response contains the needed puuid to make follow up requests