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

Understanding the difference between admin users and API users

There are two types of users in Strapi: administrator panel users and API users. Mostly, we will be working with API users, but still, it is a good idea to know the difference between them.

Admin users are those who can log in to the Strapi admin panel. When we set up and installed Strapi in Chapter 1, An Introduction to Strapi, we created our first admin user, and we have been using that user ever since to interact and work with the admin panel. Additional admin users can be added from the Settings panel.

Figure 7.1: Admin user settings locations

Figure 7.1: Admin user settings locations

The first admin users we create will have the role of Super Admin; they have access to manage all features and settings in the Strapi admin panel, but you cannot use them to interact with the API contents via the API endpoints.

API users, on the other hand, are considered another content-type in the API. Unlike the classroom and tutorial content...