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

Exploring the Strapi plugin ecosystem

Strapi aims to be easy to use and flexible to extend. As we saw repeatedly in the previous chapters, it's very easy to build an API for the default create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations, but we are not locked into the default behavior—it's always possible to extend the default behavior for our API in any way we want. That philosophy goes beyond building and coding APIs and their interactions, to almost every aspect of Strapi and its admin panel.

To achieve such flexibility, Strapi builds heavily on a plugin's architecture to open possibilities for infinite use cases beyond the core functionality.

What is a plugin in Strapi?

In the admin panel, if we navigate to Plugins under General in the main menu, we will see that there are a few plugins already installed. We have already interacted with most of these, and more detail on these is provided here:

  • Content Manager: This is where we edit our classroom...