Book Image

Designing Web APIs with Strapi

By : Khalid Elshafie, Mozafar Haider
4 (1)
Book Image

Designing Web APIs with Strapi

4 (1)
By: Khalid Elshafie, Mozafar Haider

Overview of this book

Strapi is a Node.js-based, flexible, open-source headless CMS with an integrated admin panel that anyone can use and helps save API development time. APIs built with Strapi can be consumed using REST or GraphQL from any client. With this book, you'll take a hands-on approach to exploring the capabilities of the Strapi platform and creating a custom API from scratch. This book will help JavaScript developers to put their knowledge to work by guiding them through building powerful backend APIs. You'll see how to effortlessly create content structures that can be customized according to your needs, and gain insights into how to write, edit, and manage your content seamlessly with Strapi. As you progress through the chapters, you'll discover a wide range of Strapi features, as well as understand how to add complex features to the API such as user authentication, data sorting, and pagination. You'll not only learn how to find and use existing plugins from the open-source community but also build your own plugins with custom functionality with the Strapi plugin API and add them to the admin panel. Finally, you'll learn how to deploy the API to Heroku and AWS. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build powerful, scalable, and secure APIs using Strapi.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Understanding Strapi
6
Section 2: Diving Deeper into Strapi
11
Section 3: Running Strapi in Production

Chapter 8: Using and Building Plugins

In this chapter, we will explore Strapi plugins. Plugins open unlimited possibilities for Strapi—they allow us to expand Strapi with new capabilities and functionality in a way that is reusable to avoid reinventing the wheel, and they also allow us to tap into the experiences of the larger Strapi open-source community. This functionality ranges from the basics of maintaining content, augmenting it with comments, to advanced use cases such as migrating data or syncing roles and permissions between environments. We will solve two common requirements that can be tackled using plugins. The first is enabling GraphQL for our API (short for application programming interface), which is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to REpresentational State Transfer (REST) APIs. The second is sending emails from Strapi.

Here are the topics that we will cover in this chapter:

  • Strapi plugin ecosystem
  • Installing and using plugins from...