Routing

With resource and controller classes ready, you can access the resources using the URL like http://localhost/index.php?r=user/create. As you can see, the format of the URL is the same as that for 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 endpoints. This is because [[yii\rest\UrlRule]] automatically pluralizes controller IDs for them to use in endpoints. You may disable this behavior by setting [[yii\rest\UrlRule::pluralize]] to be false, or if you want to use some special names you may configure the [[yii\rest\UrlRule::controller]] property.