Activating an API

After you have created an API definition you can activate it to auto-publish your API document and make it available for testing.

About this task

You can complete this task either by using the API Designer UI application, or by using the browser-based API Manager UI.

When you activate an API, API Connect automatically completes the following actions:

Creates a draft Product, adds the API to the Product, and publishes the Product to the Sandbox Catalog so that the API is available to be called. The Product has the title api_title auto product. Note that if you later want to delete the draft Product, you cannot delete it directly; instead, delete the API and the draft Product is deleted together with the API; see Deleting an API definition. If you want to remove the Product from any Catalogs to which it is published, you must do this separately; see Removing a Product from a Catalog
Subscribes the Sandbox test application to the Product so that you can immediately test the API in the test environment. For information on testing an API, see Testing an API.

To activate an API, you must be assigned a role that has the Product:Manage and Subscription:Manage permissions. The pre-supplied Developer role has these permissions by default; if you are assigned a custom role it must have these permissions. For more information, see Creating custom roles.

Note:

The API activation will not complete successfully if lifecycle approval is enabled in the Sandbox Catalog for the Stage, Publish, or Replace actions. If any such lifecycle approvals are enabled, then to be able to activate an API they must be disabled; for information on lifecycle approval settings, see Creating and configuring Catalogs.
To activate an API from the API Designer user interface, you must be connected to a Management server; API activation is not available with API Designer in offline mode. For more information, see Logging in from API Designer.

Products that contain an API with a Swagger property using regex that include lookahead assertions, such as "(?" cannot be validated or published. An error message is returned. For example:

Product has not been published!
The multipart 'openapi' field contains an OpenAPI definition with validation errors.
    definitions.properties.pattern Does not match format 'regex' (context: (root).definitions.properties.pattern, line: 0, col: 0)
400

Procedure

To activate an API and auto-publish your API document, complete the following steps:

In the navigation pane, click Develop, then select the APIs tab.
Click the title of the API that you want to work with.
Under Testtab, click Target Configuration. The Preferences page opens.
Set the Auto-publish toggle to the On position:

Results

On successful completion, the API is shown as On:

You can stop the API by moving the activation slider control to the Off position:

If you stop an API, the application subscription is deleted, and the auto Product is removed from the Sandbox Catalog.

Note: You can select a Catalog of your choice, or you can opt to use the Sandbox Catalog by selecting Use the default built-in Sandbox Catalog. For more information, see Specifying the testing preferences for an API.

If you make a change to the API, it is republished automatically, You can also republish a running API manually by stopping it and then re-activating it.

The error indicator shows whether there are validation errors in the OpenAPI source for the API definition. If there are errors, click the icon for more details: Screen capture showing an API with a validation error

You can also activate an API during the creation process, and on the API test page; see Creating an API definition and Testing an API.

Note: If an OpenAPI 3 API contains a response wildcard (which is not supported), publishing is disabled for that API. You must correct the problem before you can publish the API.