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

Configuring test tools

The first thing we need to do is install the required tools necessary for testing our Strapi application. The first library we need is Jest. Jest is a JavaScript library developed and maintained by Facebook; it is mainly used for unit testing. Let's get started, as follows:

  1. To install Jest, launch your terminal and execute the following command:
    yarn add -D jest

This command will install Jest for us. Notice that we have used the -D flag when installing the library. This flag is used to indicate that the library we are about to install is a development library. We only need it while we are developing and working on the application, but we do not need it in the production environment since tests are run and executed before we package and ship the application.

Jest is great to test the functionality of our API components such as controller logic or utility functions, but we cannot use it to test HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests...