Contentfully

A simple but fast API client for Contentful that lets developers focus on data instead of Contentful metadata and REST structure.

Features

• Transforms Contentful responses into simple / flat JavaScript objects.
• Stripping of metadata, retaining the basics that you need (e.g. ID, contentType, and fields).
• Recursive folding of linked entries and assets without cloning (i.e. an Entry / Asset that is reference multiple times is only created once).
• Supports custom transforms of assets URLs to allow caching or rewrites.
• Supports full Content Delivery API, including custom environments and preview servers.
• Typescript 4 support.
• React Native support.
• Customizable retries when Contentful rate-limit throttling occurs.

Installation

Current stable release (1.x)

$ npm i -s contentfully

Prerequisites

You'll need the Space ID and API key for the space that you wish to access. You can get these by doing the following after logging into the Contentful Web App:

1. Navigate to your Organization / Space (usually from the upper-left space selector in the top toolbar).
2. Select Settings → General Settings to find your Space ID.
3. Select Settings → API keys to see your generated API keys (you will need to have the correct permissions on the space to do this). Create a new API key if you need to.

Basic Usage

Getting started is really easy. First you'll need to create and configure a ContentfulClient instance.

Once configured, pass the client into a Contentfully instance:

import {ContentfulClient, Contentfully} from "contentfully";

// create the contentful client (we can use this later)
const contentfulClient = new ContentfulClient({

    // credentials for the space
    accessToken: "YOUR_API_KEY",
    spaceId:     "YOUR_SPACE_ID",

    // setup a handler to auto-retry when a rate-limit error occurs
    onRateLimitError: ExponentialBackoffHandler.create()
});

// create a Contentfully instance
const contentfully = new Contentfully(contentfulClient);

Next, we can now query Contentful using Contenfully's getModels() method. The first argument to getModels() is a query object that takes the same query parameters as a direct Content Delivery API call.

async function query() {

    // get the 3rd page of my model objects
    const json = await contentfully.getModels({
        content_type: "myModel",
        skip: 20,
        limit: 10
    });

    // print the result
    console.log(json);
};

query();

Contentfully will execute the query, recursively linking any assets or embedded content models, returning a basic JavaScript object without the Contentful metadata that you don't need.

It should look something like this:

{
    total: 10,
    skip: 20,
    limit: 10,
    items: [
        {
            _id: "5nZHNlP6zCESgGuMGKG2Q8",
            _type: "myModel",
            field1: "value1",
            field2: "value2",
            field3: false,
            field5: {
                _id: "m972ick1jqhi",
                _type: "myModelDependency",
                field1: "foo",
                field2: "bar",
                field3: true,
            },
            field6: [
                1, 4, 10, 20
            ]
        },
        ...
    ]
}

Localization with the wildcard locale parameter

Just as with the Content Delivery API, you can query entries to retrieve all localized versions of an entry by using the 'wildcard' locale=* parameter.

However the response is different from Contentful API. The locales will be lifted to top level objects so each locale can be used holistically. Please refer to the example response below. The default locale from the space will be used to for values not defined in any locale. Fallback locales are implemented for lifted responses following Contentful's "Considerations on fallback locales" documentation. Flattening can be disabled for a query by passing the Query Option flatten=false

async function query() {

    const json = await contentfully.getModels({
        content_type: "myModel",
        skip: 20,
        limit: 10,
        locale: '*'
    });

    // print the result
    console.log(json);
};

query();

Which would return models mapped by locale:

{
    total: 10,
    skip: 20,
    limit: 10,
    items: {
      "en-CA": [
        {
          _id: "5nZHNlP6zCESgGuMGKG2Q8",
          _type: "myModel",
          field1: "Hello",
          field2: "",
          field3: "foo",
          field4: true,
          field5: {
              _id: "m972ick1jqhi",
              _type: "myModelDependency",
              field1: "foo",
              field2: "bar",
              field3: true
          },
          field6: [1, 4, 10, 20],
          image: {
            _id: "m12mkd123fdr4",
            url: "foo.png",
            title: "title",
            dimensions: {
              width: 1,
              height: 1
            },
            size: 44335
          }
        }
      ],
      "fr-CA": [
        {
          _id: "5nZHNlP6zCESgGuMGKG2Q8",
          _type: "myModel",
          field1: "Bonjour",
          field2: "Comment vas-tu",
          field3: "foo",
          field3: false,
          field5: {
              _id: "m972ick1jqhi",
              _type: "myModelDependency",
              field1: "foo",
              field2: "bar",
              field3: true
          },
          field6: [2, 8, 20, 40],
          image: {
            _id: "m12mkd123fdr4",
            url: "bar.jpg",
            title: "french title",
            dimensions: {
              width: 2,
              height: 2
            },
            size: 123124
          }
        }
      ]
    }
}

Enabling experimental features

There are a couple of early-access features that have been included in the v1.x.x builds which you can enable as follows:

// create a Contentfully instance with experimental features enabled
const contentfully = new Contentfully(contentfulClient, {
    experimental: true
});

This gets you access to:

• Consolidates metadata (i.e. type, revision, createdAt, updatedAt) into a new _metadata property of each entity, with dates translated to native Javascript Date objects.
• More to come...

IE Support

TL;DR - We don't support IE.

By default, Contentfully uses the native fetch client in the browser, otherwise it will use node-fetch. Since IE does not have fetch native to it, use the fetch option with something like isomorphic-fetch when instantiating ContentfulClient.