REST API without any modules or frameworks (pure ProcessWire)

[Jonathan Lahijani]

I need to develop a RESTful API in ProcessWire.  While I haven't developed one before, I am fairly comfortable with the general idea.

There are separate PHP frameworks that specialize in this, as well as specific ProcessWire modules, however I want to do this purely with ProcessWire.  I haven't seen discussion on this, but my thinking is the necessary features are there to make this happen, which are:

• url hooks
  https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.173/
• $input->requestMethod
  https://processwire.com/api/ref/wire-input/request-method/
• $config->sessionAllow (I should disable sessions probably to example.com/api/*)
  https://github.com/processwire/processwire/blob/master/wire/config.php#L375
• one of these authentication methods
  https://blog.restcase.com/4-most-used-rest-api-authentication-methods/

Any thoughts on this or recommendations?

[elabx]

About URL hooks

Not sure it has change but once happened to me that I couldn't do optional segments, example:

/get-images/{page}/{field}/

Request wouldn't reach if I tried to get to:

/get-images/{page}/

Then I think the concept of middleware is not present? So say you want to block unauthenticated calls, check CSRF, etc, you'd have to make that check on every route hook.

Probably AppApi is still the way to go, feature wise? Project seems very alive!

Edit: Just reading AppApi actually uses path hooks to bootstrap its endpoints.

[bernhard]

6 hours ago, Jonathan Lahijani said:

I haven't seen discussion on this

There has been a lot of discussion here ? https://processwire.com/talk/topic/26792-headless-processwire-how-do-you-do-it/

4 hours ago, elabx said:

Not sure it has change but once happened to me that I couldn't do optional segments, example:

/get-images/{page}/{field}/

I think this should work:

/get-images(/{page})?(/{field})?/

? 

[Jonathan Lahijani]

3 hours ago, bernhard said:

There has been a lot of discussion here ? https://processwire.com/talk/topic/26792-headless-processwire-how-do-you-do-it/

I saw that thread before I wrote this post, but I seemed to have missed the few references to using URL hooks.

Thinking this further, I should consider using AppApi first before trying to roll my own solution.