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

Interacting with the Strapi API

To access any API endpoint in Strapi, we will use the HOST server and PORT, followed by /api/, and then the API ID (Plural) value.

Remember

The API ID (Plural) value was generated when we created the classroom content-type earlier in this chapter. It is usually the plural form of the content-type name.

So, to access the classroom endpoint on our API, we can use the following URL: http://localhost:1337/api/classrooms. This can be done from the browser since it's a GET request, but let's get into the habit of using Postman early on. The expectation is that this endpoint should return a list of classrooms:

Figure 2.10: Calling the API endpoint using Postman

Setting permissions

We received a 403 Forbidden HTTP status code from the backend. Strapi secures API endpoints by default, so we will have to explicitly tell it to allow access to the API for all users. To do that, let's head back to the admin panel...