The Basics

Introduction

Your Laravel application can have any number of JSON:API compliant APIs. We refer to each API as a Server. Each server has a class that registers the resources available in the server, and contains settings that apply to the whole server.

Defining Servers

By default, servers exist in their own namespace within your root JSON:API namespace. For example, if your root JSON:API namespace is App\JsonApi, a server called v1 will exist as App\JsonApi\V1\Server.

You may generate a new server using the jsonapi:server Artisan command:

php artisan jsonapi:server v1

Registering Servers

Once you have generated a server, you must register it within your JSON:API configuration file.

To do this, add the server to the servers array. The key must be the name of the server, and the value is the fully-qualified class name of your server.

For example, to register our newly generated v1 server:

// config/jsonapi.php

return [
    // ...

    'servers' => [
        'v1' => \App\JsonApi\V1\Server::class,
    ],
];

URI Namespace

An important property of your server is its baseUri property. This is used to generate link URIs that appear in your server's resource objects. It is the URI prefix that should appear before the resource type in the URI.

Make sure this value is set correctly. For example, if our v1 server had a URI namespace of /api/v1, we would set it as follows:

/**
 * The base URI namespace for this server.
 *
 * @var string
 */
protected string $baseUri = '/api/v1';

TIP

The value of the baseUri property is used as the first argument to Laravel's url() helper. You can therefore include hostnames if you need. For example, you could set the baseUri property to https://api.example.com/v1 if desired.

If you need to programmatically work out the base URI, implement the baseUri() method on your server (instead of setting the property).

As there can be a lot of URIs generated in a JSON:API response, it is recommended that you only do the calculation once if possible. For example:

/**
 * @return string
 */
protected function baseUri(): string
{
    if ($this->baseUri) {
      return $this->baseUri;
    }

    return $this->baseUri = '...calculated value';
}