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

Chapter 5: Customizing Our API

In this chapter, we will start customizing our API beyond basic create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. So far, all we have done is define content-types in Strapi's Content-Type Builder, which automatically created an API to create, retrieve, update, and delete entries for that type. We did not have to do any coding. As always, Strapi provided sensible defaults and got our project off the ground with minimum effort. In any large project, though, we will reach a point where these defaults are not enough, and we will want to do a bit more or alter the default behavior slightly. Strapi is very easy to extend, and this chapter will teach us how to do so.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Defining new routes in our API
  • Mapping routes to controllers and services
  • Implementing the DRY concept for our API logic
  • Securing our API by removing sensitive data and configuring the default permission policy
  • ...