Getting started with REST

This page is intended for developers who want to start using Magnolia REST features.

In this page, we:

• Show how to set up Magnolia in order to use all the REST functions provided by Magnolia.
• Give an overview of the available REST endpoints.
• Propose a few tools you can use while exploring the REST endpoints.
• Show how to configure and use the delivery endpoint.

Setup

In this section, we assume you are using a Magnolia bundle version 5.6 or higher and you know how to:

• Install Magnolia.
• Set the magnolia.resources.dir property in the magnolia.properties file.
• Start and stop Magnolia.

Required modules

The modules listed below are required to use all Magnolia REST features in a productive context:

• magnolia-rest-integration
• magnolia-rest-services
• magnolia-rest-content-delivery

When using a preconfigured Magnolia bundle, your webapps already contain these three modules. If you are using a custom webapp or bundle, make sure your custom setup contains the modules listed above. See REST module - Installing if needed.

When developing new features, it can be helpful to use the magnolia-rest-tools module which enables Swagger UI tools. 

Enabling Swagger UI tools - magnolia-rest-tools

The Swagger framework is supported by a set of core tools for designing, building, and documenting RESTful APIs.

Source: https://swagger.io/tools/

Magnolia provides integration with Swagger tools directly in the Admin UI.

If you do not want to use the Swagger UI tools, skip ahead to security settings.

Installing the magnolia-rest-tools module

To enable swagger you must add magnolia-rest-tools to your webapp(s). 

With Maven

Add the following snippet to the pom file of your webapp:

With a downloaded bundle

If you are running a preconfigured Magnolia Tomcat bundle:

• Stop the Tomcat server.
• Download the REST tools bundle 

  Error rendering macro 'artifact-resource-macro'

  com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientHandlerException: java.net.NoRouteToHostException: No route to host (Host unreachable)

  .
• Unzip the download and copy* all the files to: 
  • $tomcat/webapps/magnoliaAuthor/WEB-INF/lib
  • $tomcat/webapps/magnoliaPublic/WEB-INF/lib (if the directory already exists)

* The zip file may contain .jar files which are already present in the WEB-INF/lib folder of your webapps.

Set the Swagger API base path

The Swagger API explorer tool searches for the API at a path set in /modules/rest-tools/config/apiBasepath. The default value is  http://localhost:8080/.rest . The value for this property must match the following pattern:

<protocol>://<hostname>:<port>/<context>/.rest

When using one of Magnolia's preconfigured bundles running on localhost, set the property to http://localhost:8080/magnoliaAuthor/.rest .

Set the path to where REST services reside on your system. If you run the standard Magnolia bundle and work on the author instance, set the path to  http://localhost:8080/magnoliaAuthor/.rest .

After setting the base path, restart Magnolia.

Swagger UI tools is in Dev > REST Tools.

Set up a Magnolia bundle with all REST modules - step by step

This section provides step by step instructions to set up a Magnolia bundle that contains all REST modules including the magnolia-rest-tools module to use Swagger UI tools. The procedure uses Magnolia CLI. If you are an experienced Magnolia user, you can skip this and set up Magnolia in your preferred style.

cd ~/dev/mgnl-rest-test-base

mgnl jumpstart

mgnl-rest-test-base/
├── apache-tomcat
├── light-modules
└── magnolia.zip

cd ~dev/mgnl-rest-test-base
mgnl start

cd ~dev/mgnl-rest-test-base
mgnl start

Security settings

In the context of this tutorial and to get started quickly, we use users with roles provided by the default setup of the Magnolia bundle.

Using superuser in the author instance - for testing purposes only

In the author instance, superuser has:

• Read/Write access for the path / on every JCR workspace, granted by the  superuser role.
• Web access for the HTTP methods GET, PUT, POST and DELETE for the path /magnoliaAuthor/.rest* - granted by the role rest-admin.

Note that superuser is given a lot of power. Use it carefully in the context of this tutorial.  But never use superuser on a productive environment.

Using anonymous in the public instance

The public instance is typically visited by users who do not authenticate. These visits are done as the anonymous user, who also has some permissions.

In the public instance, anonymous user has:

• Read access on the path / for the JCR workspaces website, dam, googleSitemaps, category, and tours.
• Web access for the HTTP method GET  for the path /magnoliaAuthor/.rest/delivery/*

As you can see, anonymous user only has read access and can only access the Delivery endpoint. That is sufficient for the moment.

In a productive environment we highly recommend you create custom REST roles granting specific access for specific use cases.

REST endpoints - an overview

Magnolia provides the following REST endpoints out-of-the-box:

If you want to use REST to create, update and delete content, we recommend you use the Nodes endpoint which supports all required operations. If you mainly want to read data, consider using the Delivery endpoint. It provides convenient, formatted JSON and can be customized and configured with YAML via light module. With the Commands endpoint you can trigger commands and Cache endpoint deals with cache.

You can also create your own custom endpoints. 

Tools to test REST requests

In this section, we suggest some tools you can use to test the REST API without needing to develop a REST consuming client application. Testing your REST requests is useful when you are developing client apps and similar things that interact with the REST endpoints.

Browsers

cURL

cURL is a command line tool. It can be used on most well-known operating systems.

Swagger UI tools

If you have not installed magnolia-rest-tools, which provides the Swagger UI tools, skip this section or see how to enable the swagger tools above.

Starting the Swagger UI tools

Go to Dev > REST Tools.

When you open the the Magnolia REST Tools app, you should see something similar to this screen: 

The Swagger UI lists the bundled endpoints which already have Swagger annotations. These are the endpoints from themagnolia-rest-services module (propertiesv1, commandsv2, nodesv1) and one from the cache-browser-app (cachev1).

Click List operations or Expand operations to get the details for the operations.

Here is an example for the nodes endpoint GET operation:

Enter values at least for the mandatory parameters and click Try it out!.

Swagger shows the response code, the response headers and the response body:

Using the delivery endpoint

The delivery endpoint is a REST API provided by Magnolia out-of-the-box. Use it for obtaining JCR data as JSON. 

In addition to defining security settings, you must provide YAML-based configuration for the delivery endpoint so that it can serve JSON.

Configuring the delivery endpoint

We will create a light module to provide the YAML-based configuration required for the delivery endpoint.

In your light-modules folder, which is configured with the property magnolia.resources.dir, create the following structure:

define-delivery-endpoint/
└── restEndpoints/
    └── delivery-base-definition.yaml

You can use this code to start with for the delivery-base-definition.yaml file:

class: info.magnolia.rest.delivery.jcr.v1.JcrDeliveryEndpointDefinition
params:
  website:
    depth: 2
    nodeTypes:
      - mgnl:page
      - mgnl:area
      - mgnl:component
    childNodeTypes:
      - mgnl:area
      - mgnl:component
    rootPath: /
    includeSystemProperties: false

For the time being, note the following points:

• Line 3: website is the name of the endpoint prefix. In our case it is also the name of a JCR workspace. We use the value of the endpoint prefix later on in the REST request URL.
• Everything below line 3 defines the endpoint prefix.
• You can define more endpoint prefixes.
• Make sure you only have one YAML-based endpoint definition.

Reading website content with the delivery endpoint

With the configuration provided above, you are ready to send REST requests to your Magnolia instance.

We will fetch the content of the page /travel/about on the website workspace. Have a look at Delivery endpoint API - readNode to understand how to compose the URL. We need:

• The name of endpoint prefix => website
• The relative path of the node - relative to what is defined in the configuration as rootPath: => travel/about

URL => /.rest/delivery/website/v1/travel/about

Now add the "context" (the name of the webapp), the domain and the protocol, and you get these URLs:

• http://localhost:8080/magnoliaPublic/.rest/delivery/website/v1/travel/about
• http://localhost:8080/magnoliaAuthor/.rest/delivery/website/v1/travel/about

You can request the first URL, which goes to the public instance, with the browser as the anonymous user (without authentication). For the second URL, you must authenticate.

To test these URLs with cURL, use the following commands:

curl -X GET 'http://localhost:8080/magnoliaPublic/.rest/delivery/website/v1/travel/about'

curl -X GET 'http://localhost:8080/magnoliaAuthor/.rest/delivery/website/v1/travel/about' \
-u superuser:superuser