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

Installing and using plugins from the Marketplace

Strapi has a Marketplace that curates some of the official Strapi plugins to install directly from the admin panel. At the time of writing this book, the Marketplace is undergoing major changes and upgrades. The following screenshot shows version 3 of the Strapi Marketplace:

Figure 8.2: Strapi Marketplace version 3

Figure 8.2: Strapi Marketplace version 3

The Marketplace will host a couple of official Strapi plugins that are not installed by default, as well as community-developed plugins. One of the official Strapi plugins that are not installed by default when creating a new Strapi project is the API Documentation plugin. This plugin allows us to create an OpenAPI document and visualize our API with the Swagger UI. OpenAPI is a standard for describing REST APIs that helps when documenting APIs, visualizing them with tools such as Swagger UI, automating them, and more.

While we can directly install a plugin from the Marketplace by clicking...