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

Summary

In this chapter, we did a lot of coding. Previously, we mainly relied on the admin panel or the CLI to generate the API for us. This is amazing and one of the reasons we love Strapi – we can build 80% of our system with a few clicks on a slick UI. This chapter was about the 20% of use cases when the default is not enough, and when we want to customize the API to do a bit more or a bit less.

We dug deeper into how an API is built in Strapi by exploring the concepts of routes, controllers, services, models, and the model life cycle. We learned how to add new routes and how to map them to controllers that make use of services. We also explored some security considerations, such as sanitizing sensitive data. We learned how to disable default core endpoints, which can come in handy when we don't want to expose a certain operation.

We also looked at how to customize the API by using the model life cycle hooks, which provide us with a level of integration that&apos...