Adding API Routes in your Next.js application

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 Next.js (App Router) project. Let's see how.

Creating an API Route

To create an API route, you can use the file convention route.ts within the app directory. The file name will be the path name of the API route. For example, if you create a file called hello/route.ts inside the app directory, it will be accessible at /hello.

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

import { NextResponse } from "next/server";
export function GET() {
 return NextResponse.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.

import { NextRequest } from "next/server";
import getSupabaseRouteHandlerClient from '~/core/supabase/route-handler-client';
import requireSession from '~/lib/user/require-session';
export async function POST(req: NextRequest) {
 const client = getSupabaseRouteHandlerClient();
 const session = await requireSession(client);
 // user is authenticated, do something here
}

CSRF Token

By default, all API routes are protected against CSRF attacks if they use a mutation method. This means that you need to send a CSRF token with every request.

To add a CSRF token to your request, you can use the useCsrfToken React hook. This function will return a CSRF token that you can use in your request.

POST requests without a CSRF token will return a 403 error. This can be disabled in the middleware src/middleware.ts.