English

العربية

English

العربية

Appearance

How API-dex works ​

API-dex sits above your API gateways and gives every role 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.

The shape of the system ​

API-dex does not replace Apigee, Gravitee or Azure API Management. It connects to each of them as an environment and presents what they expose, such as APIs, specifications and credentials, through one consistent interface and one access model.

API traffic never passes through API-dex. An application calls the gateway directly with the credentials API-dex issued for it.

Two set-up steps, then two everyday flows ​

Administrators do two things once. Producers and consumers then work without administrator involvement.

Once, by an administrator ​

  1. Register an environment. The administrator connects API-dex to a gateway with that gateway's connection details and tests the connection.
  2. Define permission groups. The administrator creates the access patterns that tie teams to the APIs they may call, and links the relevant teams.

Every day, by producers and consumers ​

  1. Publish. A producer on a backend team, or a CI/CD account, uploads an OpenAPI specification to an environment. The API appears in that environment's catalog, owned by the team.
  2. Discover and subscribe. A consumer browses the catalog, reads the specification and adds the API to one of their applications.
  3. Call the API. The application's credentials, issued in the format the gateway expects, authorise the call at the gateway.

Why everything is scoped to an environment ​

The catalog, applications, credentials and analytics all belong to the environment selected in the header. This is what lets one portal represent several gateways, for example a Gravitee test environment and an Apigee production environment, without mixing their data. When something seems to be missing, the selected environment is the first thing to check. See Environments.

Role-based visibility ​

API-dex shows each person only the menus their role allows. Consumers see the catalog, their applications and their teams. Producers also see the upload area on the APIs page. Administrators also see the Admin section and organisation settings. Administrators additionally choose which modules are enabled for the organisation, such as the documentation tree or company management. See Roles and types of users and the full matrix in Reference: roles and visibility.