RESTful Web Services
RESTful Web Services in Yii 2
Content of the «RESTful Web Services» section The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0:
- Quick Start
- Resources
- Controllers
- Routing
- Response Formatting
- Authentication
- Rate Limiting
- Versioning
- Error Handling
Articles section «RESTful Web Services» The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0:
- Details
- Parent Category: The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0
- Category: RESTful Web Services
Error Handling
When handling a RESTful API request, if there is an error in the user request or if something unexpected happens on the server, you may simply throw an exception to notify the user that something went wrong. If you can identify the cause of the error (e.g., the requested resource does not exist), you should consider throwing an exception along with a proper HTTP status code (e.g., [[yii\web\NotFoundHttpException]] represents a 404 status code). Yii will send the response along with the corresponding HTTP status code and text. Yii will also include the serialized representation of the exception in the response body. For example:
- Details
- Parent Category: The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0
- Category: RESTful Web Services
Versioning
A good API is versioned: changes and new features are implemented in new versions of the API instead of continually altering just one version. Unlike Web applications, with which you have full control of both the client-side and server-side code, APIs are meant to be used by clients beyond your control. For this reason, backward compatibility (BC) of the APIs should be maintained whenever possible. If a change that may break BC is necessary, you should introduce it in new version of the API, and bump up the version number. Existing clients can continue to use the old, working version of the API; and new or upgraded clients can get the new functionality in the new API version.
- Details
- Parent Category: The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0
- Category: RESTful Web Services
Rate Limiting
To prevent abuse, you should consider adding rate limiting to your APIs. For example, you may want to limit the API usage of each user to be at most 100 API calls within a period of 10 minutes. If too many requests are received from a user within the stated period of the time, a response with status code 429 (meaning "Too Many Requests") should be returned.
- Details
- Parent Category: The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0
- Category: RESTful Web Services
Authentication
Unlike Web applications, RESTful APIs are usually stateless, which means sessions or cookies should not be used. Therefore, each request should come with some sort of authentication credentials because the user authentication status may not be maintained by sessions or cookies. A common practice is to send a secret access token with each request to authenticate the user. Since an access token can be used to uniquely identify and authenticate a user, API requests should always be sent via HTTPS to prevent man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks.
- Details
- Parent Category: The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0
- Category: RESTful Web Services
Response Formatting
When handling a RESTful API request, an application usually takes the following steps that are related with response formatting:
- Details
- Parent Category: The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0
- Category: RESTful Web Services
Routing
With resource and controller classes ready, you can access the resources using the URL like http://localhost/index.php?r=user/create
, similar to what you can do with normal Web applications.
In practice, you usually want to enable pretty URLs and take advantage of HTTP verbs. For example, a request POST /users
would mean accessing the user/create
action. This can be done easily by configuring the urlManager
application component in the application configuration like the following:
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