Strapi Plugin - Recursive Populate

A Strapi v5 plugin that adds deep recursive population for content type queries. Use the special populate=*.* value to fully populate every relation, component, dynamic zone, and media field — automatically — without hand-writing nested populate objects.

🚀 Features

• 🌳 Deep, recursive populate for components, dynamic zones, relations, and media
• 🎯 Triggered by populate=*.* — works in REST API requests and in programmatic strapi.documents() / service calls
• ⚙️ Configurable max recursion depth and max locale-traversal depth
• 🪶 Zero admin UI, zero database tables, zero runtime overhead when not invoked
• 🧩 Headless: enable in config/plugins.ts and you're done

⚙️ Installation

# Using npm
npm install strapi-plugin-recursive-populate

# Using yarn
yarn add strapi-plugin-recursive-populate

🔧 Configuration

Enable and configure the plugin in config/plugins.ts (or config/plugins.js):

export default ({ env }) => ({
  'recursive-populate': {
    enabled: true,
    config: {
      maxDepth: 20,
      maxLocale: 1,
    },
  },
});

Options

| Option | Type | Default | Description | | ----------- | ------ | ------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | maxDepth | number | 20 | Maximum recursion depth when expanding components / relations / dynamic zones. Higher values populate more, at increased query cost. | | maxLocale | number | 1 | How many levels of relation traversal are allowed before the recursion bottoms out. 0 populates localizations only, no deep relation walk. |

🎯 Usage

REST API

Send populate=*.* as the populate value on any find / findOne request:

GET /api/pages?populate=*.*
GET /api/pages/abc123?populate=*.*

The plugin intercepts the query, builds a fully-recursive populate object based on the content type's schema, and hands it to Strapi's core controller.

Programmatic (services / lifecycle hooks)

const result = await strapi.documents('api::page.page').findOne({
  documentId,
  populate: '*.*',
});

The same populate=*.* marker works through the document service. The plugin's document middleware detects it and rewrites params.populate with the full recursive tree.

Building a populate object directly

If you need the populate object without executing a query (for caching, inspection, or composition):

const populateObj = strapi
  .plugin('recursive-populate')
  .service('population')
  .getFullPopulate('api::page.page');

// Optionally override config values per-call:
const shallow = strapi
  .plugin('recursive-populate')
  .service('population')
  .getFullPopulate('api::page.page', 5, 0);

Wrapping an existing core service

The plugin exposes find and findOne helpers that wrap a core service call with deep-populate handling and reset localizations arrays on the result:

import { factories } from '@strapi/strapi';

export default factories.createCoreController('api::page.page', ({ strapi }) => ({
  async findOne(ctx) {
    const { id } = ctx.params;
    const populationService = strapi.plugin('recursive-populate').service('population');
    const coreService = strapi.service('api::page.page').findOne;

    const data = await populationService.findOne(coreService, 'api::page.page', id, ctx.query);
    return { data };
  },
}));

🧠 How It Works

The plugin walks the requested model's schema (not its data) to build a populate tree:

• Components are recursively expanded
• Dynamic zones are expanded per-component into a { on: { ... } } map
• Relations are expanded as long as maxLocale budget remains
• Media fields are populated as true
• admin::user and the related field on plugin::upload.file are excluded

Recursion is bounded by maxDepth (overall) and maxLocale (relation hops). The schema walk is in-memory only — no database hit. The actual query cost is determined by Strapi's normal populate execution after the populate object is supplied.

The plugin runs for any content type that requests populate=*.*. Trusted internal callers benefit from convenience; if populate=*.* is reachable from untrusted clients, gate it at your API layer (route policies, role permissions) just like any expensive query.

🤝 Contributing

Feel free to contribute to this plugin by:

1. Creating issues for bugs or feature requests
2. Submitting pull requests for improvements
3. Providing feedback and suggestions

📄 License

MIT License - Copyright (c) Jorge Pizzati