Usage overview

Once you have akismet installed, you can begin using it as soon as you register an API key and a site to use it on.

Obtaining an API key

Use of akismet requires an Akismet API key, and requires associating that API key with the site you’ll use akismet on. Visit akismet.com to purchase an API key and associate it with a site.

Optional arguments to API methods

For API methods other than verify_key(), only the end user’s IP address and user-agent string are required to be passed as arguments (a third argument, blog, will be automatically inserted for you). However, these methods all accept a large set of optional keyword arguments, corresponding to additinoal data accepted by the Akismet web service. This set of arguments is identical across all the API methods.

Akismet recommends sending as many of these arguments as possible, as additional data helps with identification of spam and training the service.

For a full list of the supported arguments, see the Akismet web service documentation.

The most commonly useful arguments are:

  • comment_author – a string containing the name or username of the person posting the comment.
  • comment_content – a string containing the contents of the commant.
  • comment_type – a string indicating the type of comment. For typical site comments, set this to "comment". For a contact form, use "contact-form". For a user-account signup, use "signup".

Using akismet

class akismet.Akismet

This is the wrapper class for the Akismet API. Instantiating it requires two parameters: your Akismet API key and the URL that key is associated with. You can pass these as the keyword arguments key and blog_url when instantiating Akismet, like so:

import akismet

akismet_api = akismet.Akismet(key='your API key', blog_url='http://yoursite.com')

You can also configure via environment variables: to do so, place the API key in the environment variable PYTHON_AKISMET_API_KEY, and the URL in the environment variable PYTHON_AKISMET_BLOG_URL.

Instantiating Akismet will automatically verify your API key and URL with the Akismet web service. If you do not supply an API key and/or URL, ConfigurationError will be raised. If your API key and URL are not valid, APIKeyError will be raised.

Methods for using the API are:

classmethod verify_key(key, blog_url)

Verifies an Akismet API key and URL. Although this is done automatically during instantiation, you can also use this method to check a different key and URL manually.

Returns True if the key/URL are valid, False if they are invalid.

If blog_url is not a full URL including the http:// or https:// protocol, ConfigurationError will be raised.

Parameters:
  • key (str) – The API key to verify.
  • blog_url (str containing an HTTP or HTTPS URL) – The URL the key is associated with.
Return type:

bool
comment_check(user_ip, user_agent, **kwargs)

Checks a comment to determine whether it is spam.

This method accepts the full range of optional arguments to the Akismet API service in addition to its two required arguments.

Returns True if the comment is classified as spam, False if it is not.

Parameters:
  • user_ip (str) – The IP address of the user posting the comment.
  • user_agent (str) – The HTTP User-Agent header of the user posting the comment.
Return type:

bool
submit_spam(user_ip, user_agent, **kwargs)

Informs Akismet that a comment (which it had classified as not spam) is in fact spam.

This method accepts the full range of optional arguments to the Akismet API service in addition to its two required arguments.

Returns True on a successful submission, and raises ProtocolError otherwise.

Parameters:
  • user_ip (str) – The IP address of the user posting the comment.
  • user_agent (str) – The HTTP User-Agent header of the user posting the comment.
Return type:

bool
submit_ham(user_ip, user_agent, **kwargs)

Informs Akismet that a comment (which it had classified as spam) is in fact not spam.

This method accepts the full range of optional arguments to the Akismet API service in addition to its two required arguments.

Returns True on a successful submission, and raises ProtocolError otherwise.

Parameters:
  • user_ip (str) – The IP address of the user posting the comment.
  • user_agent (str) – The HTTP User-Agent header of the user posting the comment.
Return type:

bool

Exceptions

To represent different possible error conditions, akismet provides several exception classes:

class akismet.AkismetError

Base class for all exceptions directly raised by akismet. Other exceptions may still occur (for example, due to network unavailability or timeout), and will not be caught by akismet or replaced with this exception.

class akismet.ProtocolError

Subclass of AkismetError indicating an unexpected or non-standard response was received from the Akismet web service. The message raised with this exception will include the API method invoked, and the contents of the unexpected response.

class akismet.ConfigurationError

Subclass of AkismetError indicating that the supplied configuration is missing or invalid. The message raised with this exception will provide details of the problem.

class akismet.APIKeyError

Subclass of ConfigurationError to indicate the specific case of an invalid API key.