As businesses continue to innovate in the digital space, no website is an island. Whether it’s pulling payment data from Stripe, syncing leads with Salesforce, or fetching live race results from a sports data provider, your Drupal site almost certainly needs to communicate with external services.
Drupal 10 (and the upcoming 11) is a powerful platform for these integrations, but simply connecting to an API isn’t enough. Poorly built integrations can result in a fragile system, where a third-party service outage brings your entire site down.
At Joshi Consultancy Services, we’ve seen the difference between "it works" and "it scales." Here’s how we ensure our API integrations are robust, reliable, and future-proof.
01
Embrace the Guzzle Client
Don’t resort to raw cURL. Since Drupal 8, the Guzzle HTTP client has been bundled in the core. It’s a robust, standards-compliant client that simplifies API interactions and offers better extensibility.
02
Never Hardcode Credentials
It's tempting to paste your API keys directly into the code or configuration settings to get things up and running quickly. But this creates a serious security risk, exposing sensitive credentials in code repositories or database backups.
03
Caching is Non-Negotiable
External APIs can be slow, and relying on them for every page load will degrade your site's performance. Moreover, many APIs impose rate limits (e.g., “1000 requests per hour”), making it crucial to minimize the number of calls.
Best Practice: Decouple the view from the request.
- When we fetch data, we store it in Drupal’s Cache API.
- Subsequent page loads fetch the cached data, resulting in faster load times.
- We set a “Time to Live” (TTL) for the cached data based on business needs.
Result: Your site stays fast, and you don’t exceed API rate limits.
04
Fail Gracefully
What happens if the third-party API goes down? Does your site crash with a “500 Error” or a blank screen?
try/catch blocks. If an external service times out or returns a 404, we handle it gracefully. The user might see old cached data or a friendly message like “Live data is temporarily unavailable” instead of a crash.05
Use the Queue API
Certain tasks should not block the user experience. If an action takes longer than a couple of seconds, it shouldn’t be performed while the user waits for the page to load.
Example: If a user submits a form and the data needs to be sent to multiple third-party services (CRM, ERP, marketing platform), don’t make them wait for each one.
Final Thoughts
API integration is straightforward, but resilient integration requires careful planning. By treating external APIs as unreliable services that need to be managed, cached, and secured, we ensure your Drupal site remains robust, even when things go wrong on the other side of the connection.
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