Adding an API to an AdonisJS Web App
In this series, we'll add a API, using Opaque Access Tokens for authentication, to a preexisting web application. We'll implement dual-guard authentication, add a token management panel, and authenticate our API directly with an organization model!
Module 1 › Introduction (4 lessons)


Goal of this Series
We'll cover the scope of this series and show some of the functionalities we'll be building throughout, which include an access token management panel, opaque access token authentication using an organization model, and building an API.


Getting the Web Project Up & Running
We'll get our web project cloned down. Then, we'll get it configured by first creating our database and running our migrations and seeder. Lastly, we'll get a test SMTP email inbox set up through MailTrap.


Getting Familiar with our Web Project
In this lesson, we'll quickly walk through the web application we've cloned down to get familiar with the data at play, how it's presented to the user, and the features at hand.


Overview of our Database Schema
In this lesson, we'll take a high level look at our database's schema so that we have an understanding at the entities and models at play and how they relate to one another within our application.
Module 2 › API Authentication (9 lessons)


Configuring Access Token Auth on top of Session Auth
In this lesson, we'll get opaque access tokens configured within our AdonisJS application on top of the already configured session/web authentication. This will include configuring the guard and setting up the db access token provider.


Separation of API & Web Auth Guard Concerns
In this lesson, we'll restrict our routes to their applicable authentication guard. Ensuring our web routes can properly authorize using their role-based authorization and our API can properly authorize using our access token abilities.


Defining Access Token Abilities & DTO
In this lesson, we'll finish up our preparation work by creating a data transfer object (DTO) for our access tokens. Then, we'll define what our token abilities will be within our application's API.


Creating Access Tokens Part 1: AdonisJS
In this lesson, we'll add a route to the settings portion of our application allowing the user to create an opaque access token (OAT), with the desired permissions, for the active organization.


Creating Access Tokens Part 2: Inertia/Vue
In this lesson, we'll rig up the create access token route we created in the last lesson to a form within our Vue application. We'll also stub the overall manage access tokens card for the organization itself.


Opaque Access Tokens (OAT) vs JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
In this lesson, we'll take a step back to understand the differences between the tokens we're using, which are Opaque Access Tokens (OAT), and JSON Web Tokens (JWT). We'll discuss security, scalability, and what makes up each token.



Listing an Organization's Access Tokens
In this lesson, we'll query all of our organization's access tokens and filter out any tokens that are expired. Then, we'll list the organization's tokens showing it's name, abilities, when it was created, and when it was last used.



Displaying & Copying A Newly Created Access Token
In this lesson, we'll add a secondary step to our access token creation flow that will display the newly created access token to the user one time, allow them to copy the token, then drop the token completely from memory.



Deleting/Revoking Access Tokens
In this lesson, we'll add the ability for our users to revoke an access token by deleting it out of our database.
Module 3 › Getting Started with APIs (4 lessons)



The Goal of our REST API
In this lesson, we'll briefly give an overview of REST and how we'll be taking a practical approach to it when building our API.



Our First API Endpoint to Get Our Organization's Details
In this lesson, we'll add the first endpoint to our API. With this endpoint we'll return back the Organization's details for the provided Access Token with the request.



Setting Up Our REST Client
In this lesson, we'll take some time to get set up and get comfortable with a REST Client application. This will allow us to store our API endpoints within collections to simplify testing them as we build them out. In this series, I'll be using Hoppscotch



Simple API Versioning
In this lesson, we'll implement a simple versioning mechanism for our API. Versioning allows us to safely make breaking changes without breaking our user's implementations of our API.
Module 4 › Organization Resources (8 lessons)



Listing Organization Difficulties
In this lesson, we'll begin work on our first CRUD-based API resource by adding the ability to query a list of all our organization's difficulties.



Creating Organization Difficulties
Next, we'll add a POST route and handler so that we can create difficulties from our API



Getting A Specific Difficulty
In this lesson, we'll add a GET API route enabling us to get the details of a specific difficulty by providing the difficulties id via route parameter.



Updating A Difficulty
In this lesson, we'll add a PUT API route to handle updating our difficulties! This route will also accept in a specific difficulty id via route parameter to specify which difficulty should be updated.



Deleting A Difficulty
The last CRUD method we need to add is the ability to delete our a difficulty by adding a DELETE API route, we'll take care of that in this lesson.



Access Level API CRUD
In this lesson, we'll walk through adding API endpoints for the full CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) flow for our organization's access levels.



Status API CRUD
In this lesson, we'll duplicate everything we did one more time for our organization's statuses.



API Authorization Checks
In this lesson, we'll implement our API Authorization checks across all the API controller methods we've implemented thus far. We'll then create a specific access token for each operation (read, create, update, and delete) to ensure everything is working.
Module 5 › Courses (3 lessons)



Listing Courses
Our goal in this step is to add an endpoint that lists our courses. We'll then build upon this endpoint further with the ultimate goal of getting a list of paginated courses.



Creating, Updating, and Deleting Courses
In this lesson, we'll add endpoints to allow creating, updating, and deleting courses from our API. We'll then use this to stub a number of test courses to give us wiggle room to play with our pagination.



Paginating our Course List
In this lesson, we'll transform our courses list endpoint into a pagination endpoint. We'll check and validate our query string for a page and per page parameter that we'll then use to fetch pages of our courses.