---
title: >
  Creating API endpoints with Astro
pubDate: 2023-02-09
permalink: >-
  archive/2023/02/09/creating-api-endpoints-with-astro
tags:
  - astro
---

As well as [fetching API data]({{site.url}}/archive/2023/02/08/fetching-api-data-with-astro), you can also use Astro to generate your own API endpoints.

This is an example of an endpoint that I recently created as part of a demo application:

```javascript
// trains.json.ts

import data from "@/data.json";
import type { APIRoute } from "astro";
import type { Train } from "@/types";

export const get: APIRoute = () => {
  return {
    body: JSON.stringify(data.trains as Train[]),
  };
};
```

The train data is imported from a JSON file, and Astro's `APIRoute` is responsible for setting the appropriate response headers.

For server-side rendered applications, you can also have endpoints for `post`, `del` and `all`, though for this example, I only needed to support GET requests.

This is something that I've used a db-json library for previously, but being able to do this in Astro seemed like a good fit as I can easily manage lists of stations as well as a single station from one JSON file but I can just take the static HTML that Astro generates and upload it to a static hosting solution which simplifies the hosting side of things a lot.

And, as the example application that consumes the data is also written with Astro, having them both using the same solution has advantages too.