Introducing The Moesif Developer Portal
When exposing your APIs to the outside world, many companies do so through a developer portal. Developer portals have become a staple in the API community, allowing developers to create accounts, check out available APIs, and generate access tokens.
Of course, developer portals have many uses, and their look and feel are highly custom. When it comes to actually implementing a developer portal, engineers usually have two approaches: build or buy.
When developers decide to build a developer portal, they are essentially creating an entirely new application. Building your own developer portal comes with the work of developing, testing, and maintaining the solution. These initiatives become extensive once you add a checkout, authentication, and other essential aspects of the developer-portal experience.
On the other hand, developers may leverage a solution they can buy. A developer portal within an API management solution is the most common. As many have found out, this usually still requires writing code to customize the platform, sometimes leading to a very brittle solution. Are you looking to use these built-in developer portals to monetize your APIs? That’s going to be a stretch.
Because of these reasons, we created the Moesif developer portal that meets users halfway. Our open-source developer portal marries the flexibility of a custom solution, with the framework of a pre-built/bought solution. Let’s dig a bit further into the details.
What Is The Moesif Developer Portal?
Aimed at helping developers monetize their APIs, the Moesif Developer Portal is an open-source project that gives developers a framework (and working application) that they can extend to fit their needs. Built with React and NodeJS, the solution presents developers with a mid-way solution for creating their developer portal experience, all with the benefits of both build and buy options.
The Developer Portal can connect to your favorite API gateway, and easily integrates with Stripe for a seamless subscriber and checkout flow. For security, the Developer Portal supports Okta, Auth0, and others right out of the box. So, you get an end-to-end developer-portal solution that is scalable and that uses the technologies you’re already leveraging.
Our developer portal can be stood up by simply selecting a few environment variables. Then, users can extend its features just like they would with any other React or Node app, but without having to build any of the basics.
Why Did We Create It?
We found that many developers looking to implement API monetization, and expose those APIs through a developer portal, had trouble finding any viable options. Since gateway-based developer portals are complex to extend for monetization, developers are left with the option to build their own. The challenge with building your own from the ground up is where to start.
The Moesif Developer Portal allowed us to provide a springboard to assist users in building a monetization-ready solution that is scalable and highly customizable. By providing the basics, users can get up and running in minutes, and all with scalability and customization inherently built in. The result is the Moesif Developer Portal.
How Does It Compare To Other Developer Portals?
As already alluded, the Moesif Developer Portal gives developers flexibility in which gateway they want to use for monetizing their APIs. With gateway-based developer portals, users are locked into their chosen platform. If they decide to move to another API management solution, they can’t migrate their developer portal and must create it again from scratch—vendor lock-in at its finest. With Moesif’s Developer Portal, users can easily flip out their gateway while still maintaining their developer portal functionality, without needing to re-platform it just to switch API gateways.
When using a gateway’s developer portal, developers can also be limited in their portal customization. Adding or changing pages and screens within the portal, if even possible, can be highly complex. Some developer portals require users to edit the portal code in a browser or management console and don’t allow for easy source control management. With Moesif’s Developer Portal, users can leverage React and CSS to build out whatever functionality they want and easily keep track of changes in the source control system of their choice.
Moesif’s Developer Portal gives developers another option in their “build vs buy” decision, a decision that most companies face when starting out on the road of developer portals.
How To Use The Moesif Developer Portal
When it comes to deploying the Moesif Developer Portal, this can be done in a few easy steps:
- Download the Developer Portal source code.
- Populate the .env file by following the readme.
- Optionally, customize your screens and CSS.
- Build and deploy!
Once the Developer Portal is deployed, users can easily create accounts, log in, subscribe, and access APIs within the portal.
To see a more in-depth overview, check out our latest video detailing how to use the Moesif Developer Portal.
Try It Out!
To try out the Moesif Developer Portal and to get started with Moesif, you can sign up for a free account today! Are you interested in learning more about how our Developer Portal can help you with your API monetization efforts? Talk to our team of API monetization experts.
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