After a good few years of fetching random images from subreddits, I’m officially deprecating Random Bunny. The repository has been archived, and there will be no further releases.
What happened
Random Bunny was always a thin wrapper around Reddit’s public listing endpoints.
You pointed it at a subreddit, it pulled the .json feed, and it handed back a
random image post. That worked for ages without needing an account or API keys.
In late May 2026, Reddit shut down unauthenticated .json access as part of
their scraper and platform-abuse changes. Requests that used to just work now
return HTTP 403. Both the npm package and the CLI fail with Failed to fetch result from Reddit.
The “proper” fix is OAuth against oauth.reddit.com, with each consumer
registering their own Reddit application and supplying credentials. I started
down that path for a 2.5 release, but Reddit’s Data API access is no longer a
simple self-serve signup for new apps. New credentials need explicit approval,
and their preferred route for in-platform tooling is Devvit — which can’t host
a Node CLI or an npm library.
Why I’m not continuing it
Random Bunny’s whole appeal was that you could install it and get a bunny (or whatever) with almost no setup. Asking every user to apply for Reddit API access, wait for approval, and wire up client secrets turns a one-liner into a small project of its own. Shipping a shared maintainer key in the package isn’t acceptable either.
For a tool that was mostly for my own use, that trade-off isn’t worth it. So rather than leave a broken package half-alive, I’m calling it done.
What this means for you
- The git repository is archived (read-only).
- Existing installs on npm will still download, but they will not work against Reddit anymore.
- There will be no 2.5, no OAuth release, and no further bug fixes.
- The code remains MIT-licensed if anyone wants to fork it and take on the authenticated API path themselves.
If you were depending on Random Bunny for something, sorry for the abrupt end — Reddit changed the ground rules, and the project doesn’t make sense under the new ones.
Thanks to everyone who used it, starred it, or contributed along the way. It was a fun little package while it lasted.
- Vylpes