Phasing Out APIs

In this guide, learn how to sunset older versions of your APIs in a planned way using Tyk’s API versioning features.

Sunsetting API versions

API sunsetting is the process of phasing out or retiring an older version of an API or an entire API. It’s a planned, gradual approach to ending support for an API or API version. To aid with the automation of this process, all Tyk API versions can be configured with an optional expiry date expiration (expires for Tyk Classic APIs), after which the API will no longer be available. If this is left blank then the API version will never expire. This is configured in standard ISO 8601 format.

When sunsetting API versions, you may have endpoints that become deprecated between versions. It can be more user friendly to retain those endpoints but return a helpful error, instead of just returning HTTP 404 Not Found.

This is easy to do with Tyk. You could, for example, include the deprecated endpoint in the new version of the API and configure the mock response middleware to provide your clients with relevant information and instruction. Alternatively, you could return a HTTP 302 Found header and redirect the user to the new endpoint.