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

API login and sign-up

As mentioned in the previous section, users are managed via the users-permissions plugin. This plugin is not just there to manage users; it also adds an access layer to the API using a JSON Web Token (JWT) to authenticate users. Each time a request is made to a secure endpoint, a JWT must be present in the Authorization header. Additionally, the plugin exposes two API endpoints for sign-up and login. To better demonstrate this, let's consider the following requirement:

As an API user

I want to be able to register a new account with the following properties so that I can use the system using my identity:

To satisfy this requirement, we can simply use the /api/auth/local/register endpoint to create a new user account. In Postman, issue a POST request to /api/auth/local/register with the following as a JSON payload:

{
 "username": "educator1&quot...