Routing

With resource and controller classes ready, you can access the resources using the URL like http://localhost/index.php?r=user/create, similar to what you can do with normal Web applications.

In practice, you usually want to enable pretty URLs and take advantage of HTTP verbs. For example, a request POST /users would mean accessing the user/create action. This can be done easily by configuring the urlManager application component in the application configuration like the following:

'urlManager' => [
    'enablePrettyUrl' => true,
    'enableStrictParsing' => true,
    'showScriptName' => false,
    'rules' => [
        ['class' => 'yii\rest\UrlRule', 'controller' => 'user'],
    ],
]

Compared to the URL management for Web applications, the main new thing above is the use of yii\rest\UrlRule for routing RESTful API requests. This special URL rule class will create a whole set of child URL rules to support routing and URL creation for the specified controller(s). For example, the above code is roughly equivalent to the following rules:

[
    'PUT,PATCH users/<id>' => 'user/update',
    'DELETE users/<id>' => 'user/delete',
    'GET,HEAD users/<id>' => 'user/view',
    'POST users' => 'user/create',
    'GET,HEAD users' => 'user/index',
    'users/<id>' => 'user/options',
    'users' => 'user/options',
]

And the following API endpoints are supported by this rule:

• GET /users: list all users page by page;
• HEAD /users: show the overview information of user listing;
• POST /users: create a new user;
• GET /users/123: return the details of the user 123;
• HEAD /users/123: show the overview information of user 123;
• PATCH /users/123 and PUT /users/123: update the user 123;
• DELETE /users/123: delete the user 123;
• OPTIONS /users: show the supported verbs regarding endpoint /users;
• OPTIONS /users/123: show the supported verbs regarding endpoint /users/123.

You may configure the only and except options to explicitly list which actions to support or which actions should be disabled, respectively. For example,

[
    'class' => 'yii\rest\UrlRule',
    'controller' => 'user',
    'except' => ['delete', 'create', 'update'],
],

You may also configure patterns or extraPatterns to redefine existing patterns or add new patterns supported by this rule. For example, to support a new action search by the endpoint GET /users/search, configure the extraPatterns option as follows,

[
    'class' => 'yii\rest\UrlRule',
    'controller' => 'user',
    'extraPatterns' => [
        'GET search' => 'search',
    ],
]

You may have noticed that the controller ID user appears in plural form as users in the endpoint URLs. This is because yii\rest\UrlRule automatically pluralizes controller IDs when creating child URL rules. You may disable this behavior by setting yii\rest\UrlRule::$pluralize to be false.

Info: The pluralization of controller IDs is done by yii\helpers\Inflector::pluralize(). The method respects special pluralization rules. For example, the word box will be pluralized as boxes instead of boxs.

In case when the automatic pluralization does not meet your requirement, you may also configure the yii\rest\UrlRule::$controller property to explicitly specify how to map a name used in endpoint URLs to a controller ID. For example, the following code maps the name u to the controller ID user.

[
    'class' => 'yii\rest\UrlRule',
    'controller' => ['u' => 'user'],
]

Extra configuration for contained rules

It could be useful to specify extra configuration that is applied to each rule contained within yii\rest\UrlRule. A good example would be specifying defaults for expand parameter:

[
    'class' => 'yii\rest\UrlRule',
    'controller' => ['user'],
    'ruleConfig' => [
        'class' => 'yii\web\UrlRule',
        'defaults' => [
            'expand' => 'profile',
        ]
    ],
],