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

Exploring the project structure of a Strapi application

When we ran the strapi-app CLI tool with yarn create strapi-app, the command generated a new blank project for us. Let's spend some time exploring the structure of the project and the packages that were installed for us.

The commands to run Strapi

Out of the box, the package.json file includes four Strapi-related commands that provide aliases for the Strapi CLI:

  • Development mode: While developing, we will run the API using the yarn develop command. This is an alias for strapi develop, which runs the Strapi instance in development mode, enabling features such as auto-reload and writing files to the code base when we change options in the admin panel. It also builds the admin panel.
  • Production mode: For running in production, we can use yarn start (which is the alias for strapi start). This disables auto-reload and writing files into the code base.
  • Build the admin panel: The final command is yarn build...