Apigee portals are an increasingly important part of the development ecosystem. They help deliver critical information about APIs and other assets that make it easier for companies to engage developers in building new products and services.
For the last year or so, we have been working hard on improving the Apigee developer portal experience. This work has been particularly exciting as the project moved completely to open source. We worked with Apigee to come up with ways to streamline portal management over the old Drupal 7 version. We created a new module that lets users purchase access to a monetized API product bundles and manage their prepaid balance in Drupal 8. We also built a Drupal 8 Kickstart installation profile to help get a developer portal up and running as quickly as possible.
Apigee Edge and More
Much of this work was made available with the recent release of several products. The Apigee Edge module on May 30th, 2019. It provides developer and app management as well as access control for API products. There are a few sub modules included in the project. First, the Apigee Edge API product RBAC sub-module allows more advanced access control for products. The Apigee Edge Teams sub-module allows access control based on team membership as well as team apps. "Teams" are what used to be called companies in Drupal 7 developer portals. The final sub module is the Apigee Edge Debug which is used to log API calls as part of the management of the developer portal.
The Apigee Developer Portal Kickstart installation profile was also released on May 30th, 2019. The installation profile has a guided setup process and includes a starter theme. It's a quick way to standup a simple portal and can be built out over time as needs warrant.
Apigee Monetization: Improving Access to API Product Bundles
For Apigee Monetization customers, the Apigee Monetization module was released on July 22nd, 2019. This module provides a developer the ability to purchase access to API product bundles. Developers can also see their prepaid balance and purchased plans. The project also contains a sub-module called Apigee Monetization Add Credit that provides the ability to add credit to your prepaid developer account. The integration happens via the Drupal Commerce module which has become the de facto e-commerce solution for Drupal 8. There is also the Apigee Monetization Teams sub-module that provides monetization integration for teams.
The Apigee API Catalog module will be released soon. This module provides a way to add API documentation to your developer portal. There is a release candidate so you can try out now.
The Apigee Developer Portal Kickstart installation profile provides support for configuring Apigee Monetization as part of the installation process as of version 8.x-1.3. If you just need an Apigee developer portal, the kickstart is definitely the way to go. If you want to start from scratch, you can use composer require to require the Apigee edge and Apigee Monetization modules and go from there. Development for all projects happens on GitHub so feel free to fork a project if you want to contribute to it.
Learn More
We're already hearing positive reviews of this new vision of the Apigee ecosystem. Please visit Chapter Three's Apigee section for more information or to get in touch.
