Ron Swanson quotes API

⚠️ Archival notice

19th January 2026

Sadly, I have decided to archive this repository. This was an early project of mine to experiment with Node.js deployments to Heroku, and it's since gained a lot of usage across tutorials, bootcamp projects, Alexa skills, and more. In the 11 years since I launched the API, my personal life has massively changed and I thus no longer have the time to actively maintain it.

It would be a shame for a useful educational resource to die entirely, so I'm at least happy to intervene if the current Heroku instance becomes unavailable; feel free to fire me an email using the address listed on my GitHub profile. Otherwise, no code changes will be made to the service henceforth.

Thanks for all the support and utilisation!

"On my death bed, my final wish is to have my ex-wives rushed to my side so I can use my dying breath to tell them both to go to Hell one last time." --Ron Swanson

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Because Ron Swanson is a hero. Just a ridiculously simple Node.js server.

Production host

https://ron-swanson-quotes.herokuapp.com/v2/quotes

The Access-Control-Allow-Origin header is set to * so that you can make requests from any domain.

APIs

GET /v2/quotes

Returns an array with one quote:

[
    "Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor."
]

GET /v2/quotes/<count>

Returns an array with <count> quotes e.g. GET /quotes/2

[
    "Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor.",
    "Clear alcohols are for rich women on diets."
]

GET /v2/quotes/search/<term>

Returns an array of quotes matching <term> without case sensitivity e.g. GET /quotes/search/hate

[
    "There's only one thing I hate more than lying: skim milk. Which is water that's lying about being milk.",
    "I hate everything."
]

OpenAPI 3 Schema

An OpenAPI 3 schema is available at /v2/schema. Thanks to Chris Gali for the suggestion and the initial draft.

JavaScript demo

JSFiddle (requires a browser with support for Promises, ES6, fetch, and generator functions.)

Hubot integration

I wrote a Hubot script that can be installed via npm. See the repo for more details.

Local development

Once you've cloned this repo, run npm i to install the dependencies.

Then you can run:

• npm run build: builds the TypeScript source code
• npm start: runs the compiled server