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How API-dex Works ​

API-dex sits in front of your API management platforms and gives every role — consumer, producer, and administrator — one portal to work in. This page explains the pieces and how a change on one gateway ends up visible to a developer browsing the catalog.

System architecture ​

API-dex does not replace Apigee, Gravitee, or Azure API Management — it connects to them as environments and re-presents what they expose (products, specifications, credentials) through one consistent UI and access model.

Content and access workflows ​

There are two workflows administrators set up once, and two that happen continuously afterward.

One-time setup (administrator) ​

  1. Register an environment. An administrator connects API-dex to a gateway provider (Apigee, Gravitee, or Azure) with that platform's connection details.
  2. Define permission groups. Administrators create the access patterns that tie teams to the APIs they may call.

Ongoing (producers and consumers) ​

  1. Publish. A producer (often via a backend team or the CI/CD role) uploads an API specification to an environment's catalog.
  2. Discover and connect. A consumer browses the catalog for that environment, reads the specification, and adds the product to one of their applications.
  3. Call the API. The application's credentials — issued in the format the underlying gateway expects — authorize the call. API-dex itself does not proxy traffic; the gateway you connected still handles calls.

Why environments are central ​

Every screen in the portal — the catalog, applications, credentials, analytics — is scoped to the environment currently selected in the header. This is what lets one portal represent multiple gateways (for example a Gravitee test environment and an Apigee production environment) without mixing their data. See Environments.

Role-based access ​

API-dex does not show every user the same portal. Visibility is computed from the account's role (consumer, producer, administrator, CI/CD, subscription manager) and from what your organization has turned on. See Roles and types of users and Reference — roles and visibility for the full matrix.