How to effectively version your RESTful APIs

Learn different REST API versioning techniques

Versioning RESTful APIs is one of the critical task that we must consider while designing our APIs. There are various strategies that one can employ to version the APIs. The following are a few commonly used ones:

1. Using URI versioning. In this approach, we use a version number identifier in the REST API URI to indicate the different version of the API
2. Using request parameter based versioning. In this approach, we use a HTTP request parameter to identify the API version
3. Custom HTTP header based versioning. This approach uses an HTTP request header to identify the API version
4. Media Type based versioning. In this approach, we use HTTP “Accept” header to identify the version

All these approaches are commonly used and have their own merits and drawbacks. You can refer to this GitHub URL to find detailed example on each of these techniques.

Note: My book Spring Boot in Practice from Manning Publications cover these techniques in-depth with examples. You can refer to the book if you would like to know more about Spring Boot.