Quickstart

The Trivia API serves random multiple choice questions over plain HTTP. It's free for non-commercial projects, and you can make your first request right now without an account.

Make your first request

Every request for questions goes to https://the-trivia-api.com/v2/questions. Try it from a terminal:

curl "https://the-trivia-api.com/v2/questions?limit=1"

Or open the same URL in your browser.

Read the response

You get back a JSON array of questions:

[
  {
    "id": "622a1c377cc59eab6f95055f",
    "category": "science",
    "difficulty": "easy",
    "question": { "text": "What is dialectology the study of?" },
    "correctAnswer": "Dialects",
    "incorrectAnswers": ["X-Rays", "Drugs", "Clouds"],
    "tags": ["science", "words"],
    "type": "text_choice",
    "regions": [],
    "isNiche": false
  }
]

The fields you'll use most:

The API reference describes every field.

Choose your questions

Without any parameters you get 10 questions from any category, at any difficulty. Add query parameters to narrow them down:

curl "https://the-trivia-api.com/v2/questions?limit=5&categories=history,geography&difficulties=easy"

Separate multiple values with commas. The categories are music, sport_and_leisure, film_and_tv, arts_and_literature, history, society_and_culture, science, geography, food_and_drink and general_knowledge, and /v2/tags lists every tag.

Call it from your code

JavaScript

fetch works in browsers and in Node 18 or later:

const params = new URLSearchParams({ limit: "10", categories: "science" });
const response = await fetch(`https://the-trivia-api.com/v2/questions?${params}`);
 
if (!response.ok) {
  throw new Error(`The Trivia API responded with ${response.status}`);
}
 
const questions = await response.json();
console.log(questions[0].question.text);

TypeScript

The @trivia-api/sdk package has a typed function for every endpoint, and no dependencies:

npm install @trivia-api/sdk

import { getRandomQuestions } from "@trivia-api/sdk";
 
const questions = await getRandomQuestions({ limit: 10, categories: "science" });
 
for (const question of questions) {
  // `type` tells TypeScript which kind of question this is
  if (question.type === "text_choice") {
    console.log(question.question.text, question.correctAnswer);
  }
}

When a request fails, it throws an ApiError with the HTTP status on error.status.

Python

With requests:

import requests
 
response = requests.get(
    "https://the-trivia-api.com/v2/questions",
    params={"limit": 10, "categories": "science"},
    timeout=10,
)
response.raise_for_status()
 
for question in response.json():
    print(question["question"]["text"], "→", question["correctAnswer"])

Limits and API keys

Without a key you can get up to 50 questions per request, and up to 20 requests every 5 seconds from one IP address. Going over the rate limit gets you a 429 response, so fetch a whole quiz's questions in one request rather than one at a time.

Commercial use needs a subscription. It also unlocks larger requests, sessions that never repeat a question, image questions and other languages. Send your key in the X-API-Key header:

curl -H "X-API-Key: $TRIVIA_API_KEY" "https://the-trivia-api.com/v2/questions?limit=100"

Keep the key on your server. Anyone can read a key that's in code running in their browser.

Next steps

• Get exactly the questions you want with filters, stop questions repeating with sessions, or let players type their answers.
• Moving from Open Trivia DB? The migration guide maps its parameters, categories and session tokens across.
• Build a full quiz app by following the React or Vue tutorial, or fork one of the example apps.
• Look up every endpoint, parameter and response in the API reference.