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

Understanding the makeup of a Strapi API

Several files were created for us under the src/api folder when we created the classroom content-type. Now, we will take a look at the updated project structure and consider a general overview of what was created.

Routes, controllers, services, and models

When we created our first content-type in the admin panel, several files were created under the src/api folder:

Figure 2.15: The classroom content-type folder structure

Let us have a quick overview of the route components of a Strapi API, that is the routes, controllers, services and models:

  • There are two types of routes in Strapi, a core route and a custom route. Core routes are automatically created by Strapi when a new content-type is created; the core routes are find, findOne, create, update, and delete. The routes/{content-type}.js file contains the core route (or endpoint) definitions. This file uses a createCoreRouter factory function that automatically...