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

Use case – Sending an email from Strapi

One plugin installed by default that we haven't used so far is the Email plugin. This is a plugin that allows us to send emails from Strapi. It exposes a service that can be used from our API. Let's imagine a scenario where we have a requirement such as this:

As a class admin,

I want to be notified by email when a new tutorial is created

So that I can keep track of the activities in our system.

Before hooking our email notification to tutorial creation, let's first see how we can send an email from Strapi.

Sending an email using the Email plugin

The Email plugin provides a service that we can use to send emails. We created our own service before in Chapter 5, Customizing Our API, to encapsulate logic for generating a summary. Similarly, plugins can expose services that allow us to use their functionality from other layers in the API. Plugins, as with API endpoints, make use of the same building blocks...