Concepts

API Craft has a point of view. A handful of ideas explain why projects are laid out the way they are and why the app behaves the way it does. Read these once and the guides and reference will make immediate sense.

Reading order

1. Files-first: the core idea everything else follows from.
2. The hierarchy: API → resource → operation → instance, and how each maps to files.
3. OpenAPI as the source of truth: how your edits and the imported spec stay in sync without duplication.
4. Instance visibility: public, private, and temp requests, and why "unsaved changes" don't exist here.
5. Environments: variables, secrets, inheritance, and how a {{placeholder}} is resolved.

The short version

Everything is a file in your repo. An API is a set of resources with operations, derived from an OpenAPI spec that stays the single source of truth. You run operations through request instances, against environments that supply the variables. The desktop app and the craftr CLI are two views over the same files.