How it works

Drupal 8 is by far the best CMS I have ever used. And I use the term CMS loosely. Drupal 8 is more like an Enterprise Web Development platform and, it is extremely easy to set up.

You,

1. Install it on local using either Lando or DrupalVM
2. Extend it in whatever way you seem fit
3. Export configs
4. Commit and push

I wanted a similarly easy solution but for a Headless Drupal 8 application. An out of the box Headless Drupal application with a JavaScript front-end as well. This is what Acephalous does.

Acephalous has two parts. An API first Drupal 8 distribution and an Angular (any JS framework can be used) front-end application. Let me paint you a picture and then I'll explain.

There are still improvements that I am working on, but this is basically how it works:

1. User visits a URL say "/article/some-article-that-user-is-visiting"
2. The Angular app contains a router which calls a RoutingComponent. Now, the best way to do this is to create components for all Entity types. So there will be an ArticleComponent, PageComponent, UserComponent, and so on. The RoutingComponent decides which of these components should handle the request.
   To do this, RoutingComponent needs more information. It sends a request to a URL provided by the Decoupled Router module.
3. The Decoupled Router module returns a serialized response of the entity info (type, bundle, nid, uid).
4. The RoutingComponent now has enough information to return the right component to process this request. i.e., ArticleComponent.
5. The ArticleComponent now appends a ?_format=json, gets the response, and builds the article page, and renders it on the browser.