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

Summary

In this chapter, we built our first REST API to manage our new content-type – classroom. We defined the content-type for a classroom, defining the fields that make up that type, and Strapi built an API for us where we can create new classroom entities, retrieve the list of classrooms, update existing classrooms, and delete classrooms (in other words, perform CRUD operations). We saw how Strapi allowed us to create these endpoints without any coding, saving us potentially hours of development time. We also touched on the permissions model of Strapi, which allows us to interact with these endpoints.

We also dug a bit deeper into what Strapi and the Strapi CLI create for us when we create a new project or add a new content-type. While Strapi makes it extremely easy to create APIs without worrying about specific details, knowing a little bit about what goes on under the hood helps us appreciate our design options and get a feel for how it is architected. Understanding...