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

What is the Content-Type Builder plugin?

As we briefly discussed in Chapter 2, Building Our First API, content-types are Strapi's API-agnostic way to define the entities that make up a system. The Content-Type Builder plugin is what we use to create and manage those content-types. It is one of Strapi's core plugins, it comes installed and enabled with Strapi by default, and it cannot be deleted.

Note

In production environments, the Content-Type Builder plugin is read-only and cannot be used to alter and change the API content-types.

Content-types in Strapi are categorized into three categories—COLLECTION TYPES, SINGLE TYPES, and COMPONENTS. The differences between them are outlined here:

  • COLLECTION TYPES are content-types that can manage several entries. For example, we have multiple classrooms in our system, thus we used the collection types to create the Classroom content-type in the previous chapter.
  • SINGLE TYPES, as the name suggests, are...