A random country API for quizzes and test data

Geography quizzes, "country of the day" banners, a map game's next prompt, or just realistic seed data for a form — they all need the same thing: one country, picked at random, with real fields on it.

One random country

curl "https://countries.dev/random"

{
  "name": "Lithuania",
  "capital": "Vilnius",
  "region": "Europe",
  "flag": "🇱🇹"
}

It's a normal country record, so every field is there — population, currencies, languages, borders, ISO codes. The response is sent with no-store, so a CDN or browser won't hand you the same country twice.

Just the fields you need

For a quiz prompt you rarely want the whole object. Trim it with fields:

curl "https://countries.dev/random?fields=name,capital,flag"

const { name, capital, flag } = await fetch(
  "https://countries.dev/random?fields=name,capital,flag",
).then((r) => r.json());

question.textContent = `${flag} What is the capital of ${name}?`;
answer = capital; // "Vilnius"

A "country of the day"

If you want the same country for everyone on a given day rather than a true random, pick one deterministically from the full list instead — fetch all countries once and index by day-of-year:

const all = await fetch("https://countries.dev/countries?fields=name,flag")
  .then((r) => r.json());
const dayOfYear = Math.floor((Date.now() / 86400000) % all.length);
const today = all[dayOfYear];

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