Integrating Strapi with existing backend and database
I’m working on a website that uses a Django backend with NextJS frontend. The database used is PostgreSQL. The website can be considered as an affiliate marketing platform. So a lot of features involving brands and products are present.
Now a new Strapi CMS was decided to be added to the website for handling brand and products. So the django backend will be used for all the other functions while the direct CRUD of the brands and products will be handled by Strapi.
But strapi flushes the entire connected database and I don’t want to set the entire database schema in strapi since it uses only brands and products - two tables. While the current backend has about 50 tables.
So this means that Strapi would require a new database instance.
Now, product and brand data is also needed by the existing django backend for some functions.
So is there a way that I can just use Strapi for its frontend and further plugins while I can continue to use Django as the backend.
Strapi manages only it's own database.
So the answer is no it won't be possible without another database instance.
The thing is that strapi performs database migrations based on schemas stored in your strapi project, due to complexity in this process it won't handle third party tables and would just delete them. As far as i know there is no planned way to support third party tables, and yet no known hacks to allow this.