api url rewriting

API.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+# Create an API
+
+## Route URLs to php files
+
+Routing can be accomplished with a `.htaccess` file placed in your root directory for the app.  This is not PHP related.  It's actually something that is a part of Apache.  We'll use this file to specify how our routes map to particular files.
+
+First tell Apache to allow the ability to rewrite URLs so that they map to specific `.php` files:
+
+```
+RewriteEngine On
+```
+
+Now create a route that will map any `GET` request to `/people` to `people.php`
+
+```
+RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^GET$
+RewriteRule ^people$ controllers/people.php?action=index
+```
+
+Let's break down the various parts of the first line of the last chunk (`RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^GET$`):
+
+- `RewriteCond`
+    - this specifies that a rewrite will happen given the following condition
+- `%{REQUEST_METHOD}`
+    - this tells apache to look at the request method (GET, POST, PUT/PATCH, DELETE) and compare it to something
+- `^GET$`
+    - this is what the request method will be compared to.  In this case, it's the regular expression `^GET$`.  The `^` denotes the beginning of the string and the `$` denotes the end of it.
+    - basically, it checks to see if the request method is GET
+
+Now let's break down the second line (`RewriteRule ^people$ controllers/people.php?action=index`):
+
+- `RewriteRule`
+    - this tells Apache that a rewrite rule follows
+- `^people$`
+    - again this is a regular expression where `^` denotes the beginning of the string and `$` denotes the end of the string
+    - this says to map any request with a URL that matches `people` to the file that comes next
+- `controllers/people.php`
+    - this is the "controller" file that we'll create shortly.  It will handle all routes concerning people
+- `?action=index`
+    - this says to pass a query parameter to that file called `action` with the value `index`.  You'll see later that we'll use this to query parameter to determine which action (index, show, create, update, delete, etc...) to render