Building a Fully Decoupled Drupal 8 Data Backend

Powdr Resorts recently launched a new Angular website for their Boreal Mountain Resort near Lake Tahoe. Utilizing RESTful Services as an API, our team built a headless Drupal 8 site to function as their data backend and CMS.

Realizing a fully-decoupled Javascript site presented an array of technical challenges, from routing to entity relations, and we leveraged both core and contrib to find solid solutions. The final product provides Powdr the power and ease of administering a Drupal site without compromising their marketing vision for the frontend.

This session will start with a discussion of the use case, our architectural decisions and how they were discussed and agreed upon with the separate frontend team. We will then briefly go into detail about the initial server and apache setup to separate the frontend and the backend, and how UI decisions influenced the information architecture. The bulk of the session will be how to use Drupal 8’s Services API to serve individual entities and how we assembled multiple related entities for more comprehensive calls. Finally, it will touch briefly upon some of the more involved aspects of the API, including custom entities, third-party API integrations, and future phases.