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 API endpoints from Postman

Launch Postman if it was not running and try accessing the /api/tutorials endpoint. We should be able to see the tutorial data return in the API response; however, there is no classroom data returned in the response at all. This is because, by default, Strapi does not populate relations when fetching data, and we will need to explicitly specify that we would like the relation to be populated using the populate API parameter. So, let's update the URL by appending the populate parameter to it. The URL should look like this: /api/tutorials?populate=*. This time, we can see the tutorial data, including the Classroom relation.

Figure 3.15: /tutorials API endpoint response

What Is the populate Parameter?

The populate parameter is one of several parameters included with Strapi out of the box that we can use to customize the responses from the API. We will cover this in detail later on in Chapter 6, Dealing with...