Strapi Plugin Populate All

A lightweight Strapi plugin that enables you to recursively populate all nested components, dynamic zones and relations in your REST API responses using a simple query parameter: ?populate=all.

Features

• Use ?populate=all in your API requests to automatically and deeply populate all nested relations, components, and dynamic zones for any content type.
• Fine-tune which relations are populated using plugin configuration.
• The generated populate queries are cached, so repeated REST requests for the same model are faster.

Installation

All you need to do is install the plugin. Strapi should automatically detect and include it.

npm install strapi-plugin-populate-all

Usage

Just add ?populate=all to your REST API request, for example: GET /api/articles?populate=all This will return the article with all nested components, dynamic zones and relations fully populated, regardless of depth.

Configuration

The following configuration options can be added to your Strapi project's config/plugins.js or config/plugins.ts file.

| Option | Description | Values | | ----------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | relations | Controls which relations are populated when querying. | - true: Populate all relations recursively (default)- false: Do not populate any relations- string[]: Populate only specific collection types by UID (e.g., ["api::article.article"]) | | cache | Enables or disables the plugin’s in-memory cache for faster populate query generation. | - true (default)- false | | recursion | Allows a model to populate itself N levels deep when the populate tree revisits the same modelUid. By default, self-references are skipped after the first encounter to prevent infinite loops. Use this to opt specific models in to deeper nested self-populations. | An object mapping modelUid to a non-negative integer depth, e.g. { "api::article.article": 2 }. 0 (default) means no self-recursion; 1 allows one nested level; 2 allows two; and so on. |

Example usage:

module.exports = {
  "populate-all": {
    enabled: true,
    config: {
      cache: true,
      relations: true,
      recursion: {
        // articles can populate their `related` articles 2 levels deep
        "api::article.article": 2,
      },
    },
  },
};

How it works

• The plugin provides a global middleware that intercepts requests with ?populate=all and rewrites the query to trigger recursive population.
• In the background, it builds a standard Strapi populate query as described in the Strapi documentation.
• You can control which relations are included using the relations config option.
• Inside the document API, you can set populate: '*' and _q: "populate-all" to make it work ("populate-all" can be anywhere inside _q, we detect it via .includes)