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Designing Web APIs with Strapi

By : Elshafie, Haider

4.7 (6)

Designing Web APIs with Strapi

4.7 (6)

By: Elshafie, 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.

Preface

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Download the example code files

Download the color images

Conventions used

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Section 1: Understanding Strapi

Section 1: Understanding Strapi

Free Chapter

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Strapi

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Strapi

What is Strapi?

Why use Strapi? (The benefits of Strapi)

Preparing the development environment

Creating a Strapi application

Understanding server scripts

Summary

Chapter 2: Building Our First API

Chapter 2: Building Our First API

Exploring the project structure of a Strapi application

Defining the API requirements

Creating our first content-type – a classroom

Clarifying Strapi terminology

Interacting with the Strapi API

Understanding the makeup of a Strapi API

Summary

Chapter 3: Strapi Content-Types

Chapter 3: Strapi Content-Types

What is the Content-Type Builder plugin?

Creating and managing content-types

Understanding relations in Strapi

Interacting with the API endpoints from Postman

Differences between SINGLE TYPES and COMPONENTS

Summary

Chapter 4: An Overview of the Strapi Admin Panel

Chapter 4: An Overview of the Strapi Admin Panel

Navigating around the admin panel

Managing admin users

Managing content effectively

Using the Media Library

Summary

Section 2: Diving Deeper into Strapi

Section 2: Diving Deeper into Strapi

Chapter 5: Customizing Our API

Chapter 5: Customizing Our API

The routes – where it all starts

Handling routes with controllers

Reusing logic with Strapi services

Tweaking database queries and responses with life cycle hooks

Summary

Chapter 6: Dealing with Content

Chapter 6: Dealing with Content

Creating sample data

Sorting API content

Filtering API content

Paginating API content

Under the hood – how it works

Summary

Chapter 7: Authentication and Authorization in Strapi

Chapter 7: Authentication and Authorization in Strapi

Understanding the difference between admin users and API users

API login and sign-up

Securing API routes

Using Strapi roles and permissions

Working with policies

Honorable mention – OAuth providers

Summary

Chapter 8: Using and Building Plugins

Chapter 8: Using and Building Plugins

Exploring the Strapi plugin ecosystem

Installing and using plugins from the Marketplace

Use case – Enabling GraphQL for our API

Use case – Sending an email from Strapi

Creating our own plugins

Summary

Section 3: Running Strapi in Production

Section 3: Running Strapi in Production

Chapter 9: Production-Ready Applications

Chapter 9: Production-Ready Applications

Seeding the database

Keeping permissions in sync

Serving media from an S3 bucket

Using PostgreSQL

Summary

Chapter 10: Deploying Strapi

Chapter 10: Deploying Strapi

Deploying to Heroku

Deploying to AWS Fargate

Summary

Chapter 11: Testing the Strapi API

Chapter 11: Testing the Strapi API

An overview of software testing

Configuring test tools

Setting up the test environment

Writing and running tests

Summary

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Appendix: Connecting a React App to Strapi

Appendix: Connecting a React App to Strapi

About the React app

Understanding the React app folder structure

Running the app

Why subscribe?

Understanding server scripts

Strapi comes with a few scripts that can be used in managing the development server as well as starting the server in production. If you open the package.json file, you will see the following four scripts:

Figure 1.4: Strapi server scripts

Figure 1.4: Strapi server scripts

The develop script

The develop script will start the server in development mode, with autoreload enabled. Basically, it will watch for any changes in the project files and restart the server if there are any. This script is intended for local development, and it should never be used in a production environment.

The start script

The start script will start the server with autoreload disabled. This script is intended to start the server in a production environment.

The build script

This script allows you to rebuild the admin panel. The Strapi admin panel is built using React.js, but in some situations, you might want to customize or extend the admin panel. In such cases, you will need to rebuild the admin panel again using the build script. The admin panel is built once when you have created a project and every time you install a plugin that requires changes to the admin panel.

The Strapi script

This script is an alias to the Strapi command-line interface (CLI), and we can use it to generate new content in our system. We will explore the Strapi CLI in the next chapter.

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