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

Clarifying Strapi terminology

One of the goals of Strapi is to build APIs easily and quickly without being bogged down in the implementation details of specific architectural styles (such as GraphQL or REST) or implementation details (such as which database and database connectors to use). To achieve this technological agnosticism, Strapi uses terminology that sits on top and abstracts such details. We will quickly cover this terminology so that we use the same vocabulary that Strapi uses throughout the book and will also be able to relate it to concepts we might already know from our previous exposure to other API frameworks.

Content-types, resources, object types, and models

Content-types are the fundamental building blocks in Strapi. If you have built REST APIs before using a more low-level framework, you might think of the content-types as resources. When building an API in the REST architectural style, we develop our endpoints and our interactions around resources. They...