Blogging Platform API Project Idea

You are required to create a simple RESTful API with basic CRUD operations for a personal blogging platform. CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete.

Goals

The goals of this project are to help you:

Understand what the RESTful APIs are including best practices and conventions
Learn how to create a RESTful API
Learn about common HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE
Learn about status codes and error handling in APIs
Learn how to perform CRUD operations using an API
Learn how to work with databases

Requirements

You should create a RESTful API for a personal blogging platform. The API should allow users to perform the following operations:

Create a new blog post
Update an existing blog post
Delete an existing blog post
Get a single blog post
Get all blog posts
Filter blog posts by a search term

Given below are the details for each API operation.

Create Blog Post

Create a new blog post using the POST method

POST /posts
{
  "title": "My First Blog Post",
  "content": "This is the content of my first blog post.",
  "category": "Technology",
  "tags": ["Tech", "Programming"]
}

Each blog post should have the following fields:

{
  "title": "My First Blog Post",
  "content": "This is the content of my first blog post.",
  "category": "Technology",
  "tags": ["Tech", "Programming"]
}

The endpoint should validate the request body and return a 201 Created status code with the newly created blog post i.e.

{
  "id": 1,
  "title": "My First Blog Post",
  "content": "This is the content of my first blog post.",
  "category": "Technology",
  "tags": ["Tech", "Programming"],
  "createdAt": "2021-09-01T12:00:00Z",
  "updatedAt": "2021-09-01T12:00:00Z"
}

or a 400 Bad Request status code with error messages in case of validation errors.

Update Blog Post

Update an existing blog post using the PUT method

PUT /posts/1
{
  "title": "My Updated Blog Post",
  "content": "This is the updated content of my first blog post.",
  "category": "Technology",
  "tags": ["Tech", "Programming"]
}

The endpoint should validate the request body and return a 200 OK status code with the updated blog post i.e.

{
  "id": 1,
  "title": "My Updated Blog Post",
  "content": "This is the updated content of my first blog post.",
  "category": "Technology",
  "tags": ["Tech", "Programming"],
  "createdAt": "2021-09-01T12:00:00Z",
  "updatedAt": "2021-09-01T12:30:00Z"
}

or a 400 Bad Request status code with error messages in case of validation errors. It should return a 404 Not Found status code if the blog post was not found.

Delete Blog Post

Delete an existing blog post using the DELETE method

DELETE /posts/1

The endpoint should return a 204 No Content status code if the blog post was successfully deleted or a 404 Not Found status code if the blog post was not found.

Get Blog Post

Get a single blog post using the GET method

GET /posts/1

The endpoint should return a 200 OK status code with the blog post i.e.

{
  "id": 1,
  "title": "My First Blog Post",
  "content": "This is the content of my first blog post.",
  "category": "Technology",
  "tags": ["Tech", "Programming"],
  "createdAt": "2021-09-01T12:00:00Z",
  "updatedAt": "2021-09-01T12:00:00Z"
}

or a 404 Not Found status code if the blog post was not found.

Get All Blog Posts

Get all blog posts using the GET method

GET /posts

The endpoint should return a 200 OK status code with an array of blog posts i.e.

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "title": "My First Blog Post",
    "content": "This is the content of my first blog post.",
    "category": "Technology",
    "tags": ["Tech", "Programming"],
    "createdAt": "2021-09-01T12:00:00Z",
    "updatedAt": "2021-09-01T12:00:00Z"
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "title": "My Second Blog Post",
    "content": "This is the content of my second blog post.",
    "category": "Technology",
    "tags": ["Tech", "Programming"],
    "createdAt": "2021-09-01T12:30:00Z",
    "updatedAt": "2021-09-01T12:30:00Z"
  }
]

You don’t have to implement pagination, authentication or authorization for this project. You can focus on the core functionality of the API.

While retrieving posts, user can also filter posts by a search term. You should do a wildcard search on the title, content or category fields of the blog posts. For example:

GET /posts?term=tech

This should return all blog posts that have the term “tech” in their title, content or category. You can use a simple SQL query if you are using a SQL database or a similar query for a NoSQL database.

Tech Stack

Feel free to use any programming language, framework, and database of your choice for this project. Here are some suggestions:

If you are using JavaScript, you can use Node.js with Express.js
If you are using Python, you can use Flask or Django
If you are using Java, you can use Spring Boot
If you are using Ruby, you can use Ruby on Rails

For databases, you can use:

MySQL if you are using SQL
MongoDB if you are using NoSQL