Once you have configured your carefully planned out Provider Organization, Catalogs, and spaces, you can technically begin developing and publishing your APIs and products. Although you might be tempted to jump right into this, there is one final piece we must configure so that the consumers can discover your APIs—the Developer Portal. You might develop the most useful APIs going, but as we said earlier in this chapter – if no one can find them, they aren’t much good.
The Developer Portal is the place developers will go to discover and register for your APIs that are available. This is where you will socialize your APIs to the outside world. This is their window into your API organization. In addition to socializing your APIs, the Developer Portal also provides analytics, forums, blogs, and rating facilities.
Since this is where the consumers of your APIs will go to find them, the Developer Portal will be a representation of your company to the outside world. For this reason, the Developer Portal is fully customizable so that you can brand and customize it to best represent your organization. The level of customization is entirely up to you, though. You can put as little or as much time into customizing it as you see fit.
Before we think about customization and branding, we must first configure the Developer Portal for each Catalog.
Configuring the Developer Portal
This is done at the Catalog level for each Catalog you have configured within your Provider Organization.
- To begin this configuration, you must be logged into API Manager and be on the Home screen.
- You will then navigate to Manage catalogs | DEV and click the Catalog settings tab. From this screen, you will click the Portal link on the left navigation menu as shown in Figure 3.18:
Figure 3.18 – Catalog settings
- From this screen, you can see that there are no Developer Portals added to this Catalog so we will need to create one by clicking the Create button in the top-right corner.
This will bring you to a screen where you will simply need to select one of the Portal services that were created in the Cloud Manager during your initial setup. You will see that the URL field will be automatically populated for you, which will include the Provider Organization and the Catalog name in the URI.
- Clicking the Create button then completes the Developer Portal creation. Figure 3.19 shows this screen where we are creating a new Developer Portal for our DEV Catalog. You can see that we have chosen our previously defined portal service named Developer Portal and the URL was automatically populated with the base URL defined in the Portal Service and the URI made up from the Provider Organization name and the Catalog name:
Figure 3.19 – Create a new Developer Portal
- Once you click the Create button, you will be brought back to the previous Catalog settings page. That page indicates that your new Developer Portal creation has been initiated along with the new Developer Portal details showing the Portal Service being used, the Portal URL, and the User Registry used. Figure 3.20 shows this confirmation page for the creation of our new Developer Portal for our DEV Catalog in our APIC Healthcare Provider Organization:
Figure 3.20 – Developer Portal creation confirmation
- The Developer Portal creation can take some time to complete, so be patient. Once it completes, you will receive an email that will be sent to the email address listed for the user that you have logged into API Manager with. The text within this email will be addressed to Administrator (admin) because this email will contain a link that will bring you to the Developer Portal page to reset the password for the admin user. An example of this email is shown here:
Figure 3.21 – Developer Portal creation email
This is a one-time-use-only link and will bring you to the page shown in Figure 3.22, which will make it clear that this link can only be used once. From here, you will click the Sign in button to change your admin password:
Figure 3.22 – Change admin password
- The next screen will again make it clear that this is a one-time login link and you will enter your new password for the admin account and confirm it as shown in Figure 3.23:
Figure 3.23 – Enter new admin password
- After entering your new admin password and confirming it, click the Submit button to complete the process. If the passwords are valid, your admin password will be changed and you will be redirected to the Developer Portal home page as shown in Figure 3.24:
Figure 3.24 – Your new Developer Portal
You have now successfully added a Developer Portal for your Catalog. You would need to repeat this process for each Catalog within your Provider Organization the same way. As you complete this process for each Catalog, you will notice that the URL to access the Developer Portal for each Catalog will change to reflect the Catalog that it belongs to. As you publish your products and APIs to each of these Catalogs, you will see them appear in the respective Developer Portal for consumers to discover.
At this point, you can move on to customize your Developer Portal to personalize and brand it to represent your organization, or you can simply leave the default look. The choice is entirely up to you. You can find more information on customizing the look of the Developer Portal in Chapter 15, API Analytics and the Developer Portal:
You have now completed the configuration of your entire Provider Organization and can now begin to create, publish, and socialize your APIs!
Summary
In this chapter, we have taken you on a long journey and introduced you to many terms and concepts. You were introduced to configuring your first Provider Organization, Catalogs, spaces, and finally, the Developer Portal. All of this may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but as you go through your planning sessions to determine the structure and layout of your own organization, this will become clearer. It cannot be stressed enough how critical careful upfront planning and organization are to the success of your digital framework transformation. This will become more evident as you go through the API life cycle from development, to publishing, to retirement.
Now that you have learned about the foundation for setting up your API environments, our next chapter will expand on this by explaining and demonstrating the process of creating your own APIs.