How to use strapi

Requirements

Make sure you have followed the contributor guide to setup the development environment
Get ready for a decent amount of reading

Once you've got the development environment setup, then you will be able to access the strapi admin dashboard running on http://localhost:1337/admin.
You'll have to create an admin account to be able to use the strapi dashboard, so enter a username and password that you'll remember. It should look like this.
Once you've created an account, we can get into the fun stuff!

To be able to test authenticated routes in the api, you'll need to create a test user
To create a test user head to the users collection
Once on that page, click on "+ Add New Users" on the top right of the screen
Once on that page, fill out all these fields since they're required ![Users Fields][./images/how-to-use-strapi/users_fields.png]
After that, click the green save button on the top right

I'm going to be using insomnia in this tutorial, but you can use any other REST client
If any of the endpoints you want to test are public, then all you need to do is make the request for it normally since it doesn't require any authentication
If one of your endpoints is protected by authentication, and you try to make a request to it without signing in as your test user, you'll get a 403 forbidden error .
To sign in as your test user, make sure to make a POST request to http://localhost:1337/auth/local with a JSON object with the keys identifier and password then click the purple send button. Identifier is just your username or email of the test user.
After signing in, you should get a 200 status code and a response that looks something like this
After being signed in, you can now make any requests that require authentication

If you ever need to test the api with a frontend application i.e React then you'll need to setup the google provider to be able to login with google to emulate our login system in production. However, if you just need to test endpoints without the need of testing the api with a frontend application then you can just use postman or any other rest client.
To setup the google provider, you'll need to go to settings then under users and permissions click "Providers"
After clicking on "Providers", you should be on a new screen where it lists all the different Providers
Click on the google provider then ping #Alejandro Armas#4672 in the backend chat to get the client id and client secret
After receiving the client secret, click the enable toggle and fill out the fields
After doing that, click save
You can now login with google using http://localhost:1337/connect/google

If you ever need related data to be grouped together then you'll need to create a collection
To create a collection you'll have to go to the content types builder on the left of the screen
Once on that page, click on "+ create new collection type"
When you click on "+ create new collection type" you should see this
Make sure when typing in the name of the collection to do so in PascalCase and keep the name singular
For example, UserProfile
Now you should be able to define all the fields and its data types for your collection
After defining your collection, all you have to do is click the green save button on the top right of the screen
To add entries to your collection, click on your collection on the left side of the screen.
On the new page, click the "+ Add new "
After filling out all the fields for your entry, click on the green save button on the top right. After clicking that, make sure to click the blue publish button

If you ever need reusable structure, then you'll need to create a component
To create a component, click "+ add another field" in the content-type builder screen
After clicking on that, click on the component button
After that, you can fill out the name of the component.
You should also fill out the name of the category.
You can click on any random icon
There are two types of components
- Repeatable Components which are best used for multiple instances(If you need an array use this)
- Single Component which are best for grouping fields like full addresses, main information, etc.
click on either repeatable component or single component(whichever fits best for your purposes)
After that you can add fields to your component by clicking on the "+ Add field to this component"

There are two roles in strapi, Public and Authenticated
By default, all users have the Authenticated role
This is important because there will be cases were you only want users who are logged in to access some resources and vice versa.
You can change what role has access to what resource in settings
To go to settings, click the settings icon on the bottom left of the screen
After clicking settings, go to where it says "Users and Permissions Plugin" and click roles
After clicking on roles, you should be on a new page where it shows both the Public and Authenticated roles.
If you want to make it so only a endpoint is accessible to a logged in user, then enable that endpoint for the authenticated role
To do that, click on the authenticated role
After that, you should be on a new page with a bunch of checkboxes
Find the collection and endpoint you want to allow logged in users to use
For example, if you want to allow logged in users to be able to make a GET request to /projects to retrieve all projects then you'll have to find the projects collection click on the find checkbox then click save on the top right of the screen
After clicking save, you can test by making the http request for the endpoint you enabled