How versioning of APIs work

Versioning our APIs

Find the git repo here

As we keep on building our backend we improve and add new functionalities to it. It is reasonable to think that we will work in versions of our APIs which may or not be completely different from our previous deployments. A similar example can be drawn with windows, windows keeps on improving with new versions and after some time older versions are no longer given support by Microsoft.

Doing similar thing on our backend is necessary. The basic process that we follow to keep our code clean are the following:

1 . Create a separate file for our routers 2 . Implement the versioned versions in that file. 3 . Export the module and import it in app.js 4 . Use the middleware to use the separate file.

Go through the blog to understand what these steps mean.

Making Routes

We will create a route /v1/planets and will re-direct our requests to this router.

To make things cleaner we need to make a separate file for our versions. Since we are using 1 version only we will make a single file named api.js (for this example) in our routes and send all our requests to the api.js

For now the api.js will look like this

const {planetsRouter} = require('./planets/planets.router');
const {launchesRouter} = require('./launches/launches.router')

const express = require('express');

const api = express.Router();

api.use('/planets',planetsRouter);
api.use('/launches', launchesRouter);


module.exports = {
    api
}

Following things are being done in this file

1 . The planets and launches router modules are being imported here

2 . There is no express module here so we imported the express using require('express')

3 . We need the Router() functionality of express so we created api object just like we created planetsRouter and launchRouter in planets.router.js and launches.router.js

4 . Now we have the the two middleware and we export the api object.

Inside app.js we will import our api module and use the following middleware

app.use('/v1',api)

Incase we have many more version we will use the similar process.

We updated our routers but we need to update our frontend as well.

Go to the requests hook and change the API_URL which is base URL to

const API_URL = 'http://localhost:8000/v1';

Run the deploy and our project will listen at 8000

How versioning of APIs work

Table of contents

Versioning our APIs

Making Routes