Are there any naming convention guidelines for REST APIs?

api rest naming-conventions
jnorris picture jnorris · Apr 22, 2009 · Viewed 178.7k times · Source

When creating REST APIs, are there any guidelines or defacto standards for naming conventions within the API (eg: URL endpoint path components, querystring parameters)? Are camel caps the norm, or underscores? others?

For example:

api.service.com/helloWorld/userId/x

or

api.service.com/hello_world/user_id/x

Note: This is not a question of RESTful API design, rather the naming convention guidelines to use for the eventual path components and/or query string parameters used.

Any guidelines would be appreciated.

Answer

LiorH picture LiorH · Apr 24, 2009

I think you should avoid camel caps. The norm is to use lower case letters. I would also avoid underscores and use dashes instead

So your URL should look like this (ignoring the design issues as you requested :-))

api.service.com/hello-world/user-id/x

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