These days, software and platforms expose API to enable other applications interface with the core application. Developers use API to create custom interfaces and dashboards. I have previously covered REST API in my previous articles.

In this article, I will demonstrate how you could easily create a custom WooCommerce dashboard. Although this dashboard will be pretty basic, you could easily extend it to fit your requirements. I will use WooCommerce PHP API for implementing the Dashboard.

Before going further, you need to know how RESTful APIs work, how they authenticate requests and how responses are returned by the API.

Cloudways has taken all the pain out of launching and maintaining a successful WooCommerce store. If you need help in setting up a WooCommerce store on the Cloudways Platform, all you need to do is sign up to the Platform and launch a WooCommerce application.

Next, login to the store�s Admin Panel, go to the WooCommerce Settings and enable REST API. Go to the Key/Apps tab and enter the Key Description, select the permission you want (for the purpose of this tutorial, I have selected Read/Write). Now click the Generate API Key button.

You will get the API Key, API Secret and QR code to scan,

I will use these keys in the future to work with the WooCommerce REST API.  But before all this, I will install the PHP API package for WooCommerce.

WooCommerce has an official API package (written in PHP) that can be used for creating custom apps. The package is well maintained and available on GitHub.

For installing the API package, I will launch a PHP stack app. Once the application is up, go to the SSH terminal using the provided Master Credentials. Move to your PHP application and run the Composer command for installing the package.

This command will install the latest version of the package available on GitHub. You can also find composer.json file in your folder. Next, create an index.php file. I will use Bootstrap and jQuery for the frontend. In addition, I will also use JavaScript. So add the following code in the HTML head tag:

After installing the package,  you need to require autoload.php for initializing the library. This API library has HTTP function for sending the requests and getting the responses. I will add the HTTP client library in the index.php: