Tips and How to name your API endpoint?

Sometimes, it can be very confusing on how to name your api endpoint.

This is the tips and guideline for you on how to name your API endpoint

1. Use only nouns, rather than adding verbs

Example:

👍🏻 /users
👎🏻 /get-users

It will be funny if you put action in the endpoint. We will directly straight know, it use a GET request.
Use singular or plural nouns? It depends.
If get more user, preferably use /users. If one user, then /user is the answer

2. Short, Clear and Intuitive

Example:

👍🏻 /id
👎🏻 /identification-number
👎🏻 /id/1234/fn

For example 3, this would be misleading. It's not clear. What is fn? As for me, I would think it a function

3. Build hierarchy and grouping into logical groups

Example:

👍🏻 /departments/managers
👍🏻 /product/variation

4. Use only lowercase

Example:

👍🏻 /kyc-form-application
👎🏻 /KYCFormApplication

URIs are case sensitive, try to avoid upper case unless it is necessary. And also, avoid unnecessary confusion and inconsistency in naming your endpoint.

5. Avoid special characters in the endpoint

Example:

👍🏻 /store
👎🏻 /%store

You can refer here for list of special character

6. Use hyphen (-) to separate words rather than underscore (_) or camelCase

Example:

👍🏻 /generate-s3-presigned-url
👎🏻 /generateS3PresignedUrl

Your endpoint will looks more cleaner, clearer and user friendly. Google recommend us to use hyphens as it is good for Google search, it make its web crawling job easier, thus creating more consistent results.

7. Use camelCase for parameters

Example:

👍🏻 /user/{userId}
👎🏻 /user/{user_id}

8. Do versioning for your user to use the endpoint

Example:

Our API will keep changing over the time, the implementation, the request body, the response etc, hence versioning is important to avoid the endpoint from breaking when the user use it. For me, the easiest way to do versioning is the 1st way.

Avoid doing silly mistake like me when I create my endpoint before this. But hey, we learn from our mistakes right?

That's all for the tips and how to naming your endpoint!

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