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

Navigating around the admin panel

Once we log in to the admin panel, we can see a navigation menu on the left. The navigation menu is divided into several sections, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.1: Strapi admin panel navigation menu

Let's look at the different sections of the navigation menu in more detail.

Content Manager

Content Manager is where we can manage the API content. COLLECTION TYPES are defined here. Out of the box, we have one type, Users, that is created by the Roles & Permissions plugin (covered in Chapter 7, Authentication and Authorization in Strapi). As we define more content-types in our project, they will appear here. Similar to collection types, SINGLE TYPES appear once we create our first single type in the Strapi Content-Types Builder plugin.

PLUGINS

By default, we have two plugins installed in Strapi: the Content-Type Builder plugin, which we used already in the previous two chapters to define...