REST API Best Practices
API Best Practices
REST API Guides
REST API Reference Documentation Examples
General API Design Best Practices
Path Design Best Practices
Meaningful and consistent naming conventions:
- The API path should use meaningful and consistent naming conventions that are easy to understand and follow. This can help ensure that the API is easy to use and maintain.
- Bad Example:
/endpoint1, /api2, /get3 - Good Example:
/users, /orders, /products
Nouns instead of verbs:
- The path should use nouns instead of verbs, as HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE are used to indicate the action being performed.
- Bad Example:
/getUsers, /updateOrder, /deleteProduct - Good Example:
/users, /orders/{orderId}, /products/{productId}
Simple, hierarchical, and intuitive paths:
- The API path should be simple, hierarchical, and intuitive, with clear and logical relationships between the resources being represented.
- Bad Example:
/users/orders/get, /products/{productId}/get - Good Example:
/users/{userId}/orders, /products/{productId}
Query parameters for filtering and searching:
- Use query parameters for filtering and searching, as this can help simplify the API path and make it more flexible.
- Example:
/users?lastName=Smith&age=30, /products?category=electronics
Path parameters for resource identifiers:
- Use path parameters to identify and locate specific resources, as this can help make the API more efficient and easier to use.
- Example: /users/{userId}, /orders/{orderId}, /products/{productId}
Plural nouns for collections:
- Use plural nouns to represent collections of resources, as this is a common convention that helps make the API more intuitive.
- Example:
/users, /orders, /products
HTTP status codes to indicate success or failure:
- Use HTTP status codes to indicate whether the request was successful or not, and provide clear error messages and responses to help users understand the issue and how to resolve it.
- Example:
200 OK, 201 Created, 404 Not Found, 500 Internal Server Error
Versioning to manage changes:
- Use versioning to manage changes to the API path and avoid breaking backward compatibility. This can help ensure that existing clients can continue to use the API without requiring significant modifications or updates.
- Example:
/v1/users, /v1/orders, /v2/products
Sub-resources for related resources:
- Use sub-resources to represent related resources, such as a user's orders or a blog post's comments. This can help make the API more intuitive and easier to use.
- Example:
/users/{userId}/orders, /orders/{orderId}/items, /blogs/{blogId}/comments
Consistent formatting for dates and times:
- Use consistent formatting for dates and times, as this can help prevent confusion and errors.
- Example:
Always use ISO 8601 format for date and time. Like 2023-08-02T12:30:00Z
Avoid using verbs in the path:
- Avoid using verbs in the path, such as "create" or "update," as this can make the path less intuitive and harder to read.
- Bad Example:
/createUser, /updateOrder, /deleteProduct - Good Example:
POST /users, PUT /orders/{orderId}, DELETE /products/{productId}
Use hyphens to separate words:
- Use hyphens to separate words in the path, as this can help make it more readable and easier to understand.
- Example:
/order-items, /product-categories, /user-profiles
Keep the path short and sweet:
- Keep the path as short and sweet as possible, without sacrificing clarity and meaning. This can help make the API more efficient and easier to use, especially for mobile or low-bandwidth clients.
- Bad Example:
/endpointForRetrievingUsers, /apiToFetchOrders, /pathToGetProducts - Good Example:
/users, /orders, /products
Service Best Practices
- Ease of Use
- Easy to use and manage APIs
- Ability to monitor and analyze API performance
- Automation of routine tasks
- Ability to create, deploy and manage APIs with minimal effort
- Tools making API management easier:
- Postman: A popular API development and testing tool that allows you to easily create, test, and document APIs.
- Swagger: An open-source tool for designing, building, and documenting RESTful APIs.
- Apigee: A full-featured API platform that includes tools for designing, building, and managing APIs.
- Kong: An open-source API management solution that includes features such as authentication, rate limiting, and caching.
- AWS API Gateway: A fully managed service from Amazon Web Services that makes it easy to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.
- Tyk: A popular open-source API Gateway that can be used to manage and secure APIs, it also has a cloud version.
Security
- Security policies and access control rules
- Authentication and authorization
- Encryption of data
- Protection of APIs from external attacks
- Tools useful for security:
- API Gateway: A service that sits in front of your API and acts as a reverse proxy, handling authentication, rate limiting, and other security-related tasks.
- OAuth and OpenID Connect: These are popular open standards for secure API authentication and authorization.
- JSON Web Tokens (JWT): A compact, URL-safe means of representing claims to be transferred between two parties.
- API Key: A unique identifier that is used to authenticate API requests.
- SSL/TLS: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) are cryptographic protocols that provide secure communications over the internet.
- API Firewall: A service that monitors API traffic for malicious activity and blocks it.
- Vulnerability scanning and penetration testing: Regularly scan for vulnerabilities and simulate attacks to identify and remediate security issues.
- Logging and monitoring: Keep track of all API calls, including the parameters and payloads, and monitor for suspicious activity.
- It's important to remember that security is an ongoing process, and it's essential to regularly review and update your API security measures to ensure they're up-to-date with
Scalability
- Ability to scale APIs to meet increasing demand
- Ability to manage multiple versions of APIs
- Ability to handle high traffic loads
- Tools:
- API Gateway: An API gateway can handle the heavy lifting of routing, authentication, rate limiting, and other tasks, allowing your API servers to focus on processing requests.
- Load Balancer: A load balancer distributes incoming API requests across multiple servers, improving the overall performance and scalability of your API.
- Microservices Architecture: Breaking your API into smaller, independently deployable services can make it easier to scale specific parts of your API as needed.
- Caching: Caching API responses can reduce the load on your servers and improve the performance of your API.
- Asynchronous Processing: Using asynchronous processing techniques, such as message queues, can help your API handle large numbers of requests without becoming overwhelmed.
- Cloud-based hosting: Platforms like AWS, Azure or GCP allows you to scale your APIs on demand, by adding and removing resources as needed.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): CDN's can cache your API's content, images and other static files close to the end-users, reducing the load on your servers and improving the performance of your API.
- Auto-scaling: Automatically scaling the number of server instances based on the current demand, which allows you to quickly and easily scale your API as needed.
Monitoring
- Real-time monitoring of API performance
- Alerts and notifications for API downtime
- Automated logging of API calls and responses
- Detailed analytics on API performance and usage
- Tools:
- Postman: A popular tool for testing and documenting APIs. It allows you to make requests, view responses, and track changes over time.
- APImetrics: This tool allows you to monitor the performance of your API and alert you to any issues.
- Runscope: This tool allows you to test, monitor, and analyze your API performance. It also provides detailed error tracking and debugging capabilities.
- New Relic: A monitoring tool that provides performance metrics and alerting for your API, along with other parts of your stack.
- Prometheus: An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. It can be used to monitor the performance of your API and alert you to any issues.
- Grafana: An open-source metric analytics and visualization suite, that can be used to monitor the performance of your API.
- Loggly: A cloud-based log management service that can be used to centralize logs from your API and alert you to any issues.
API Documentation
- Clear and detailed documentation for APIs
- Easy to understand information about API endpoints
- Up to date documentation for current and future APIs
- Tools:
- Swagger: An open-source tool that allows you to design, build, and document your API. It also provides a user-friendly interface for testing your API.
- Postman: A popular tool for testing and documenting APIs. It allows you to create and share documentation for your API, and includes features such as request and response examples, and the ability to test endpoints.
- Readme.io: A documentation platform that makes it easy to create and maintain API documentation, and also allows you to include interactive examples of your API in the documentation.
- OpenAPI(formerly known as Swagger) : Is an open-source tool that helps to create, maintain, and document RESTful APIs. It has a large ecosystem of tools that can be used to create, test, and deploy APIs.
- AsciiDoc: An open-source tool that allows you to create structured documentation in plain text, which can then be converted to a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF, and e-books.
- RAML: An open-source tool that allows you to create and maintain API documentation, and also includes features for testing your API.
- ApiDoc: A command-line tool that generates API documentation from source code comments, it supports several programming languages like javascript, typescript, PHP and Java.
Versioning
- Ability to easily deploy and manage multiple versions of APIs
- Ability to roll back or forward to different versions of APIs
- Ability to maintain backward compatibility with older versions
API Testing
- Automated unit testing of APIs
- Performance and load testing of APIs
- Ability to test APIs in a sandbox environment before deployment
- Tools:
- Postman: A popular tool for testing and documenting APIs. It allows you to make requests, view responses, and track changes over time. It also supports automated testing and has a built-in test editor.
- SoapUI: An open-source tool for testing SOAP and RESTful web services. It supports functional testing, load testing, and security testing.
- Apache JMeter: An open-source Java application that is designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It can be used to test the performance of APIs and also has built-in support for functional testing.
- TestCafe: An open-source tool that allows you to perform end-to-end testing of web applications. It can be used to test the functionality of APIs by simulating user interactions with the API.
- Rest-Assured: An open-source Java library that makes it easy to test RESTful web services. It supports both testing of the request and response and can be integrated with testing frameworks such as JUnit and TestNG.
- Karate: An open-source tool that allows you to perform API testing. It uses a simple and expressive syntax, and supports both testing of the request and response, and also has built-in support for testing security and performance.