Communities

Communities in API Portal define the exposure of APIs and packages to consumers. A community can have one or more administrators that manage the members of a community. The APIs and packages assigned to the public community are exposed to all users including unregistered users.

There are two types of communities - Private Communities and Public Communities.

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.

A private community is a group of users in API Portal that users can join through an invitation. Community membership grants API consumers access to private APIs and packages. APIs and packages that are associated to a private community are only visible to users that belong to this community. Each private community has one or more community administrators. Community administrators can add users to or remove users from the community.

To add existing users, the administrator needs the full user ID.

New users are invited to join API Portal and the community of the inviter. New users invited to a private community are not added to the public community.

If users do not belong to any other community including public communities, they are removed from API Portal; and their access tokens are revoked.

Note: If you want to add an API or a package to a private community and restrict its visibility to the community members, you have to add the API or package to the private community and then remove it from the public community.

The public community is a community any registered user can join. Each API Portal instance features only one public community. By default, all APIs and packages are assigned to the Public Community and they are visible to all users. This is the default community of a user joining without specifying a private community. Public community members and guest users can see the public APIs and packages.