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

The routes – where it all starts

In Chapter 2, Building Our First API, we briefly described the components that make up a Strapi API. The first of these, from an API consumer point of view, is the route. Routes define the external interface to our API; that is, the URIs the consumers of the API need to communicate with to interact with the API:

Figure 5.1: Components of a Strapi API

Figure 5.1: Components of a Strapi API

By default, when we create a content-type, Strapi creates a REST API with core routes to perform CRUD operations. The definition for these routes exists in code and can be changed in code instead of using the admin panel or the Strapi CLI, as we have done so far.

Let's look at the tutorial type we created in the previous chapters and the code that was generated in more detail to understand what Strapi gave us by default.

The default routes

When we defined the tutorial content-type in the admin panel, Strapi built a RESTful API for our content-type. It defined...