Groupon deals via curl
Groupon's consumer deal data comes from one GraphQL endpoint that answers a
plain server-side curl with no cookies, no key, no login, no bot wall:
POST https://www.groupon.com/mobilenextapi/graphql
-H 'content-type: application/json'
-H 'apollographql-client-name: mobilenextapi'
Requests are a batched JSON array of Apollo persisted-query operations
(operationName + variables + extensions.persistedQuery.sha256Hash, no query
text — introspection is off and the server masks GraphQL errors as opaque 400
HTML, so you cannot hand-author queries). The response is a JSON array;
.[0].data.<field> holds the payload. Ready-to-run bodies + jq recipes are in
references/graphql-queries.md.
The three operations
| Need | Op | Root field |
|---|---|---|
| Search / browse a city's deals | BrowseDealFeed |
.[0].data.browseDealFeed.cards |
| One deal's full detail (options, price, reviews, fine print) | getDeal |
.[0].data.getDeal |
| Category taxonomy | GetMainNavigation |
.[0].data... |
division is a Groupon city slug (new-york, chicago, syracuse, los-angeles, …).
dealId for getDeal is a deal's permalink slug = the last path segment of a
card's .url (https://www.groupon.com/deals/<dealId>).
Two failure modes
- Empty / non-JSON 2xx → almost always a challenge interstitial; retry, don't
JSON.parseit blind. {"errors":[{"message":"PersistedQueryNotFound"}]}→ the bakedsha256Hashwent stale (Groupon redeployed its frontend queries). Re-capture it:- Open a Groupon search page in a signed-in-or-not browser, DevTools → Network.
- Filter for
mobilenextapi/graphql, click the request whose payloadoperationNamematches the one you need. - Copy
extensions.persistedQuery.sha256Hashfrom the request payload and replace the stale hash inreferences/graphql-queries.md. (The hash is a public query fingerprint, not a secret.)
Note: the deal web page groupon.com/deals/<slug> returns 403 to servers, but
the getDeal GraphQL op above returns the same detail with no auth.