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

Differences between SINGLE TYPES and COMPONENTS

Strapi single types allow us to have one entry per single type. They are useful when we do not want to have multiple entries. We want to have an API name, a description, a version, and a list of developers as metadata information stored in a single type and have it publicly accessible via an endpoint. To do so, we will create a single type. Proceed as follows:

  1. In the Strapi admin panel, navigate to the Content-Type Builder plugin page.
  2. Click Create new single type under the SINGLE TYPE category.
  3. We will call this collection Info.
  4. Create Short Text fields for the name and version fields.
  5. Create a Long Text field for the description field.

The process is illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.17: API info Single type

Let's save the info Single type and add some content to it.

  1. Click Save to save the Single type.
  2. Wait for the server to restart. Once the...