SPEAKER: Providing a good user experience for consumers
of your API is crucial.
This work continues even after you've intentionally
built your API with simple and intuitive design.
It's also equally important to enable developers
with self-service tools to easily find and learn
how to use your API so they can ultimately
build their app using your APIs quickly and securely.
Apigee's configurable developer portal enables app developers
with API discovery, exploration, learning, and testing.
And so in this episode, we will learn more
about the developer portal.
Whether the APIs you build are for internal or external use,
the developer portal enables API developers
to publish your catalog of API products,
offer detailed documentation for each of those products,
create an easy app developer onboarding process,
have mechanisms to create an app and an API key.
You can even try out your API.
You can also leverage the default templates
or customize the portal's styling
to suit your company's branding.
And what's nice is that it's connected
to your Apigee console, which centralizes
all your API management tasks in one place, including
API analytics, which we will dive in another episode.
Now let's take a quick tour from both a publisher's view
at setting up the portal, as well as the consumer's view
accessing the portal.
In prior episodes, we talked about how
to create a Cloud project, enable Apigee APIs, creating
an evaluation org, then log into Apigee.google.com,
build your API Proxy, and later bundle one or more proxies
into an API product.
Now to create a portal from the same console,
visit Publish, Portals, the plus Portal
button to create a new portal.
Since I already have one, I will click Cancel and use this one.
Next, we will see the different items you
can configure in your portal.
Now we added an existing API product
by selecting API Catalog, the plus sign in the top corner,
and then select an API product, then
select Next to go to the API Details page.
You also need to check the box called
Publish to be able to be listed in the catalog.
Next, you need to associate the documentation for that API
product.
The format of the documentation is an open API specification,
which is an industry standard.
In this demo, I already created one for this simple proxy.
You can then add an image and associate categories
that help make the API searchable on the portal.
Then click Save.
Once you have added the product and publish the documentation,
you can actually visit the developer portal
to see what it looks like by selecting the Live Portal
link to launch it.
This is a developer portal that Apigee
provides to get you started.
And to make changes to the pages and theme,
you can return to your portal's configuration options,
and then choose a page-- for example, Get Started.
This will open the page editor where
you can make changes using markdown's simple formatting,
which is then converted to HTML to render
the page in your browser.
Now let's see the view from an external app
developer visiting the portal.
App developers first sign up to create an account and login,
so they can create an app and get an API key.
After that, this is the landing page
for a consumer app developer.
They can see all the API products available
and explore their details.
I can view those endpoints to understand how they work,
and I can actually execute a call to try it out.
If I don't have an API key, I get an error.
To create my own API key, I visit
New app, Enter App Details, and enable the API product I
wish to use, and click Create.
Now Apigee registered my app and assigned a key
to it, which I can quickly copy.
Now let's go back into the API product and test out the key.
Click Authorize.
And from the dropdown, you can see
that it knows I already created an app, which
I select and click Authorize.
Now I can make a call, which you can
see it points to my demo app inside of my evaluation org
and is using this product.
Great.
So to wrap up, let's do a small recap.
Apigee provides a configurable app developer
portal out of the box, which is publicly
available on the internet where developers can find your API
catalog, sign up, register their app
to get an API key to use with the APIs.
The interactive API documentation
allows developers to test out the API while they're also
developing their app.
If you found this episode helpful, community,
you can subscribe to learn about more episodes
on getting started with Apigee's API management tool set.
Cheers.
[MUSIC PLAYING]