API Reposiotry with native git

APIs have become an integral part of modern software and business infrastructure, providing a means of expanding the capabilities of software and enabling efficient integration with external services. As a result, an increasing number of organizations across various industries are investing in API development to enhance both internal and external workflows.

The process of API development involves several stages and stakeholders, working with different tools and processes. Understanding the various stages of the API producer and consumer lifecycles is crucial to the successful development and management of APIs. These stages typically include planning, designing, developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining APIs.

The API producer is responsible for creating and managing the API, while the API consumer utilizes the API to build applications or integrate with existing software. These two lifecycles intersect at various stages, such as during the testing phase, where the API producer ensures that the API meets the requirements of the API consumer.

The Apigit API Platform is designed to help organizations navigate through the API development and management process more effectively. With Apigit, native Git support is a key feature, allowing users to manage their APIs as code and collaborate with other team members seamlessly.

By leveraging the capabilities of Apigit, organizations can streamline their API development and management processes, reducing the time and effort required to build and deploy high-quality APIs. This ultimately leads to improved operational efficiency and better integration with external services, enabling businesses to stay competitive in the modern digital landscape.

What is the API Repository?

Apigit’s API Repository, is navtive Git Repository, which is a place for you to create an API and manage the entire lifecycle of the API. The API repository save and maintain API documentation, tests, and specifications alongside code. This allows Apigit customers to improve collaboration with API producers because you can work with your team in a multi-user, multi-branch setup. You can commit and push changes without affecting your team or consumers until you’re ready to publish.

API development lifecycle

How to use the API Repository to manage your APIs

Step 1: Create a repository

Apigit’s API abstraction is central to all API workflows. To get started, create a repository and add API Specifications.

With an increasing number of developer teams building APIs instead of shared libraries, collaborating on source code is often disconnected from other API workflows (Apigit Collections, definitions, contract tests, and documentation). This leads to sub-optimal productivity; APIs being duplicated across the org and contracts not always being adhered to. We believe that the repository is an integral part of the broader API construct, as it holds the source code of the API.

Step 2: Design, develop, and collaborate with your teammates

Now that the API Repository is set up, you can start designing and developing it. Add definitions and collections in Apigit, mock and test the API.

For the Git-linked API, you always work on a branch. The current branch is shown on the API (check the top right) and the Source Control panel is on the right. You can commit and push changes to your repository like you would in native git. At any point, you can also look at the commit history, compare your changes against the last commit, or even discard changes. All this is now possible from within the Apigit, enabling you to effectively work according to the Git workflow that your team has adopted.

One important part of API development is collaborating with your teammates. Your teammates can now pull the changes you have made and start collaborating on them. Apigit allows you to resolve conflicts in case changes are made to the same file simultaneously.

The changes made are visible only to the editors of the API—they can switch to the branch and see all changes made on the repository.

Step 3: Testing and automating the API

You can start by adding a test to your API Repository. These can validate the functionality of your API by simulating complex API usage scenarios.

Once the API is developed, it is ready to be deployed in your runtime environments.

Step 4: Publish your API and distribute it to consumers

As a team working on a complex API across multiple branches, your stakeholders—both within and outside your team—will need a referenceable API, complete with documentation and a sandbox to enable evaluating endpoints.

You can now have versions of your API, which are like locked states of the API that you can ship to your consumers. Once a version is published, consumers will continue to see that version until you publish a new version. Consumers can also go back to any version that was published earlier. This helps you isolate any in-development changes from your API consumers, and they only see stable/ published versions of the API that you want them to consume.

Versions also help you document your API’s changelog over time, which could be used to indicate how new your API has evolved over multiple versions.

Step 5: Gather feedback and iterate on your API

Once the API is published, you will get some feedback and might want to start adding new endpoints or fixing some issues. You might send a few requests from your collections to understand current API behavior and edit your API definition or collections.

Your next step will be to make updates and push changes to your repository. You can start by creating a new branch in Apigit and making changes to the API.

At any point, you can discard the changes that you have made in your Apigit repository or look at the difference between the changes you have made vs the last state of the repository, and finally push the changes to the repository.