Publish APIs

After you build your APIs, you must publish them to make the APIs available for consumption by developers and consumers. Publishing an API enables developers and consumers to consume the functionalities exposed through your API. They can then integrate the functionalities that APIs provide into applications easily. Creating and developing an API in webMethods API Gateway does not make it accessible to your users. Activate the API prior to publish to a portal so that the gateway endpoint is available for the developers and consumers to invoke the API.

webMethods API Gateway publishes APIs to the Developer Portal from where they are available for consumption by developers and consumers.

Optionally, webMethods API Gateway publishes the APIs to the following destinations:

• Service registries enable applications to dynamically locate an webMethods API Gateway instance that can process that API.
• Integration Server is used in API first implementation approach.

In addition to publishing, webMethods API Gateway provides you with capabilities to customize your APIs prior to publishing them. You can customize APIs depending on how you want to restrict exposure of specific information the APIs handle as follows

• Restrict the exposure of specific resources, methods, and operations of an API to other applications.
• Define a custom gateway endpoint by customizing the URL of the gateway endpoint that your users use to access the API.

The following sections describe how you can activate an API, customize the gateway endpoint, and publish APIs to different destinations.