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

We started this chapter by explaining the difference between Strapi admin users and API users. Afterward, we explored how API users can sign up and log in to the API using the routes exposed by the users-permissions plugins. We also discussed JWTs and saw how we can edit their configurations.

After that, we started working on securing and protecting the API routes. We changed the create tutorial's endpoint, making it accessible by logged-in users only, and explained how the authorization flow works in Strapi.

Then, we took a deep dive into the roles and permissions. We revisited the main actors diagram for our API and used it to create the required roles by our API.

Finally, we introduced the concept of policies in Strapi and saw how can we use them to further enhance the API authorization flow by allowing users to edit and delete their own content only.

In the next chapter, we will explore the Strapi plugin system. We will understand the Strapi plugin ecosystem...