# Adding API Routes in your Remix application

> API Routes allow you to create server endpoints in your Remix App that you can call from your client or from external sources

*Canonical: https://makerkit.dev/docs/remix-supabase/how-to/api/api-routes*

---

API routes are a way to create a custom API endpoint for your application. You can use API routes to create RESTful endpoints that return JSON data.

Adding an API route to a Makerkit application is no different than any other Remix project. Let's see how.

## Creating an API Route

To create an API route, will export an `action` function from your routes.

Here's an example of an API route that returns a JSON response as response to a `GET` request.

 ```ts {% title="app/routes/hello._index.ts" %}
import { json } from "@remix-run/node";

export async function loader() {
  return json({ text: 'Hello' });
}
```

This is kinda simple, right? Let's see how we can use this API route in our application.

### Protecting API Routes

It's very likely that you want to ensure only authenticated users can access your API routes. To do that, you can use the `requireSession` function.

In the example below, we create a `POST` API route that requires the user to be authenticated. If the user is not authenticated, the user will be redirected away. Additionally, the `requireSession` function will also ensure the level access if the user opted in to multi factor authentication.

 ```ts {% title="app/routes/route._index.ts" %}
import { LoaderFunctionArgs } from "@remix-run/node";

import getSupabaseServerClient from '~/core/supabase/server-client';
import requireSession from '~/lib/user/require-session.server';

export async function loader(args: LoaderFunctionArgs) {
  const client = getSupabaseServerClient(args.request);
  const session = await requireSession(client);

  // user is authenticated, do something here
}
```