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

Under the hood – how it works

You might be wondering how we can perform all of these operations just using API parameters. Does Strapi fetch all the data for a certain model from the database and then filter it according to the API parameters?

Under the hood, Strapi uses Knex.js, a popular multi-dialect SQL builder for Node.js. The API parameters are parsed using a query builder utility; the parsed result can then be used in Knex.js to run the database queries.

Important Note

If you are interested in checking out the filter query builder, you can find the source code in the node_modules/@strapi/database/lib/query/query-builder.js file.

In the previous chapter, we briefly mentioned the Query Engine API. The Query Engine API allows unrestricted access to the database layer at a lower level. It makes use of the query builder previously mentioned together with Knex.js to run and execute database queries. The Query Engine API is available through strapi.db.query.

...