Developing Backend Made Easy!

Developing Backend Made Easy!

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3 min read

Are you thinking of creating a content providing the backend for your project?

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» : Yes!

Gonna do it for yourself from scratch?

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» : Yes. Planned to do so.

Before that let me suggest a guy, strapi.

Strapi is the leading open-source headless CMS. It’s 100% Javascript, fully customizable, and developer-first.

What actually a headless content management system means?

Its a perfectly separated backend application developed from scratch for content delivery through REST APIs. Simply, it is a content repository that comes with an admin panel to add content and it can be displayed in frontend over RESTful APIs.

Why we need headless CMS?

  • Web and mobile applications can be served with your content.
  • Build any website using your familiar technology.
  • Use REST APIs to communicate with your content.
  • Create your content with a pre-built user interface.
  • Now, most of the CMS supports GraphQL queries which can be used to queries your data from Frontend applications such as React, Vue, Angular, etc.

Why Strapi?

  • Open source and free forever.
  • Easy to create, update, and manage content.
  • Supports GraphQL.
  • Select the database of your choice (SQLite, MySql, Postgres, MongoDB).
  • Easy one-click deployment.

Sounds easy right?

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» : Yep! But how to do that?


Step 1 Package manager of your choice. I am using yarn in this example.

yarn create strapi-app my-project --quickstart

Note: Here, --quickstart flag will create a strapi-app with SQLite database. You can skip the flag if you need to change a specific database.

While creating a project it will expose you to admin panel, else navigate to localhost:1337/admin

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  • Complete the form to create the first Administrator user.
  • Click Ready to start.

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Step 2

That's it. You have created your own backend Node application in minutes.

Now, create your new collection/table in the Content-types builder tab,

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with all your required columns/fields.

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Step 3

After creating content type with its required fields, the created one will be shown in the sidebar under collections, select and add your content as,

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Save it.

Step 4

Navigate to Roles & Permissions -> Public, you can see your APIs created.

Boom!!!

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To view it in the browser, make it public.

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You can also add authentication to your APIs, allow public access, and so on.

Now we have created our headless CMS in just a few steps. You can simply use this REST API in your frontend mobile, web application using HTTP client or GraphQL queries.

Refer Strapi Official Documentation for more - strapi.io/documentation/v3.x/getting-starte..

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» : Will try that out and let you know how cool it is in the comment. Bye!

Thanks.

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