Why use Strapi? (The benefits of Strapi)

There are several advantages to using Strapi, and we will outline some of the major benefits and reasons for using it next.

Open-source Node.js

Strapi is open-source and built on top of a popular Node.js framework: Koa. Its code is accessible and easily extendible. It's supported by a thriving company but also by a large community of contributors. You can find Strapi's code on GitHub at https://github.com/strapi/strapi.

Database-agnostic

Strapi can work with different database systems. It can be set up and configured to work with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and SQLite. We will see in Chapter 9, Production-Ready Applications, how we can configure Strapi to work with PostgreSQL.

Customizable (extendable)

Strapi is highly configurable to suit each project's specific requirements. All of the data types are created from scratch through the admin panel. Additionally, the Strapi plugin system makes it easy to extend its functionality with features such as database documenting, image uploads, and email configuration. We will discuss the Strapi plugin system in a later chapter of this book.

RESTful and GraphQL

Strapi provides a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) API out of the box. The API can be consumed from any web client (React, Angular, Vue.js, and so on), mobile applications, or even internet of things (IoT) applications using REST or GraphQL via a plugin.

Users and permissions

Strapi comes with a users and permissions model out of the box that allows you to define which endpoint is available for which user/role. Additionally, you can use Open Authorization (OAuth) to enable authentication via third-party providers such as GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many others.

Now that we have understood what Strapi is all about, let's see how we can prepare our development environment to start developing our API.