Skip to main content

Quickstart

Goals and Motivations​

  • Cover all of the minimal, standard, and stretch goals
    • While all stretch goals will have appropriate documentation and endpoints to support their functionality, not all of their endpoints may be implemented.
  • Have endpoints that correspond to functionality on every frontend page of Trek so far
  • Follow best practices for API design, including documentation, testing, and standards as documented by the relevant RFCs

Group Discussion​

  • There will be no semantic versioning
  • There will be global server errors that are as informative as possible during the development phase
  • All dates are represented in Unix Epoch time

Getting Started​

Add description of what a REST API is and how it works here

The proposed URI for the API is /api/v1, which will be incremented on any release updates. To avoid the API versioning to increment too quickly, we will make fewer but larger updates to the API as required.

The release of the next API version will deprecate all prior API versions, but the prior API versions will remain available for one year after its deprecation.

Authentication​

Many of the endpoints of Trek will not be accessible without authenticating a request.

At the moment, the proposed authentication method will be Auth0 implementing OAuth2. Auth0 is preferred as it has an implementation of OAuth2 already, in addition to support for protecting against attacks such as cross-site request forgery.

Documentation is available at https://auth0.com/docs/api/authentication and https://oauth.net/2/. Requests that require authentication will require a “Authorization: Bearer” token in the request’s header resulting from a successful OAuth client-server token exchange.

Supported Datatypes​

At the moment, the only proposed supported datatype is JSON. JSON is one of the most popular formats and is very compatible with JavaScript.