Overview
Community facilitates API Administrators or API Providers in handling API visibility among the Developer Portal users.
Users with API Administrator and API Provider privileges can create communities and manage the members of a community.
There are two types of communities in Developer Portal - private community and public community.
Private community
As the name suggests, a private community contains APIs that are available only for its members.
When publishing an API from API Gateway, providers can select specific communities to restrict the access of asset by other users.
Users can access only the assets that are assigned to their communities. For example, consider your portal provides APIs to the users of multiple domains such as Banking, Healthcare, Telecom, and so on. In such cases, you can group the users of each domain as a community and offer them the required APIs.
Public community
The public community comes along with the product installation and is open to all users, registered or non-registered.
By default, the APIs published from API Gateway and the ones created in Developer Portal are posted as a part of the public community. If an API that is not a part of the public community, you can add the APIs to the public community using the Edit option.
To restrict the access of assets, users must assign them to a private community.
Manage communities in Developer Portal
The Manage communities section allows you to group the users who work in a project or users with similar roles as a community to assign APIs only for the access of that community. This feature is helpful for providers that offer APIs to a wide range of customers from various disciplines.
API Administrators have the privileges to assign community administrators, add users to, and remove users from a community. APIs are assigned to specific communities by API Providers, and the packages are published to communities from API Gateway. API consumers have access to APIs and packages depending on whether they belong to a specific community or not. Consumers can view the API(s) that belong to a community by grouping the APIs by Communities in the API gallery page.