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hoitomt/API Best Practices Notes.md

Created June 5, 2017 15:26
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API Best Practices Notes
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API Best Practices Notes.md

Source: http://www.vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmatic-restful-api

  • Use SSL
  • Do not redirect from non-SSL to SSL (encourages clients to keep doing it)
  • Version in the URL (At least major)
  • Unary attribute (+/-) in sort params to indicate direction of sort
  • Provide way for user to specify return fields
  • snake_case is easier to read (Even though it is not the standard way to define variables in Javascript: CamelCase)
  • pretty print by default (responses are slightly larger). Over-arching concept is that an API should also be human-readable
  • Support .gz compression, if not default to it. Much faster API
  • Accept json bodies for POST, PATCH, PUT
  • Add pagination info to the header (RFF 5988)
  • Add rate limit information to the header
  • API should be stateless - no cookies or sessions for authentication
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