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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the Strapi plugin ecosystem. We started by explaining the concept of a plugin in Strapi and how to install and configure a plugin from the Marketplace. We gave an example of using the API Documentation plugin and saw how can it be used to generate OpenAPI specifications for our API. Then, we explained how we can find more community-based plugins from GitHub or via npm.

We then explored two popular plugins and use cases. First, we learned how to enable GraphQL for our API and how to use GraphQL Playground to test it and explore the generated schema. Next, we learned how to send emails from Strapi by using the Email plugin. While configuring the Email plugin, we also explored the concept of a provider, setting up a custom email provider for us to use in production.

Afterward, we dug deeper into the plugin architecture and created our own custom local plugin with a frontend component to show in the admin panel. This opens up endless capabilities...