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

Seeding the database

Database seeding refers to the process of populating the database with data—this can be data required for the initial application setup or just sample data for demonstration purposes. This process is usually done when the application starts for the first time. Luckily for us, Strapi comes with a bootstrap lifecycle function that is executed every time the server starts. This function is located in the src/index.js file. Let's open this file and, for now, just print a simple hello world message, as follows:

Bootstrap(/*{strapi}*/){
    strapi.log.info("Hello World");
};

Once you have saved this simple change, the server will restart, and you should see a simple Hello World message printed on the screen, as follows:

Figure 9.1: Hello World from bootstrap function

Figure 9.1: Hello World from bootstrap function

In Chapter 7, Authentication and Authorization in Strapi, we created three roles for our API (short for application programming...