After creating an API, you might want to change its behavior, authentication mechanism, resources, throttling tiers, target audiences etc. at a later point in time, depending on new business or technical needs of the organization. But, you cannot do these changes to an API that is already published and has users plugged into it. A published API should be fixed. The way to modify it is by publishing a new version of the API with changes. Depending on the changes, you can decide to depreciate the old API after a defined period of time, so that the users have time to test their applications with the new API. The API Manager facilitates API versioning as part of API life cycle management.
The steps below show how to create a different version of an existing API.
1. Log in to WSO2 API Publisher with a user who has been assigned the "creator" role. For more information on creating users and assigning roles, refer to section User Management.
2. Once logged in, the currently available APIs will be listed in the "All APIs" window. Click on the API to which you want to create a version of. For example,
3. The API's "Overview" tab opens. Create a copy of the API using the "Copy" button in the Overview tab. For example,
4. It opens a window allowing you to specify a new API version. Generally, the format "version.major.minor" is recommended.
Click the "Done" button to complete.
5.The newly added version will appear in the "All APIs" window.
Once the new version is created, a user who has the "publisher" role assigned can publish the API. When publishing, the "Deprecate Old Versions" option can be selected to automatically deprecate the previous version of this API. For instructions on publishing an API, refer to section Managing an API Life Cycle.