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

Defining the API requirements

We will be building an API for a Learning Management System (LMS). This is a system for an educational institution that runs classrooms for different courses. Students can enroll in these classrooms, and teachers can create new tutorials and assign them to classrooms. Another (non-core) functionality might include creating quizzes that the students can answer and the teachers can mark. An admin can also access the system to add new students, teachers, and classrooms, and manage all entities:

Figure 2.3: A use case diagram for the main actors and functionalities of the LMS

In the next section, we will create our first API, which we will use to manage a classroom. The endpoint will allow us to perform CRUD operations; that is, we will be able to Create, Read, Update, and Delete classrooms.