REST API Design Best Practices “Application Programming Interface,” or API, refers to a communication channel between various software services. Applications that transmit requests and responses are called clients and servers, respectively. A well-defined API should be easy to work with, concise, and hard to misuse. Here are some general recommendations: 1. Use nouns instead of verbs Verbs should not be used in endpoint paths. Instead, the pathname should contain the nouns that identify the object to which the endpoint we are accessing or altering belongs. For example, instead of using /getAllClients to fetch all clients, use /clients. 2. Use plural resource nouns Use the plural form for resource nouns because this fits all types of endpoints. For example, instead of using /employee/:id/, use /employees/:id/. 3. Be consistent When we say to be consistent, this means to be predictable. When we have one endpoint defined, others should behave similarly. So, use the same case for resources, the same auth methods for all endpoints, the same headers, the same status codes, etc. 4. Keep it simple We should make naming all endpoints resource-oriented, as they are. If we want to define an API for users, we would describe it as: /users /users/124 So, the first API gets all users, and the second one gets a specific user. 5. Do proper error handling Here, we want to eliminate any confusion when an error occurs. We must handle errors properly and return a response code indicating what happened (from 400 to 5xx errors). We need to return some details in the response body along with a status code. Follow Tushar Verma for more related content: #softwaredevelopment #coding #restapis #apis #security