# Adding your API - File System

By choosing a File System based configuration we have a static way of configure Janus (similar to nginx).

## 1. Boot it up

We highly recommend you to use one of our examples to start. Let's see the [front-proxy](https://github.com/motiv-labs/janus/tree/2470815283dbbce92900fce0c175b6fb9fc0574f/examples/front-proxy/README.md) example:

Make sure you have docker up and running on your platform and then run.

```bash
docker-compose up -d
```

This will spin up a janus server and will have a small proxy configuration that is going to a mock server that we spun up.

## 2. Verify that Janus is working

Issue the following cURL request to verify that Janus is properly forwarding requests to your API. Note that \[by default]\[proxy-port] Janus handles proxy requests on port `:8080`:

If you access `http://localhost:8080/example` you should something like:

```javascript
{
    "message": "Hello World!"
}
```

A successful response means Janus is now forwarding requests made to `http://localhost:8080` to the elected upstream target (chosen by the load balancer) we configured in step #1, and is forwarding the response back to us.

## Understanding the directory structure

By default all apis configurations are splitted in separated files (both single and multiple api definitions per file are supported) and they are stored in `/etc/janus`. You can change that path by simply defining the configuration `database.dsn`, for instance, you can define the value to `file:///usr/local/janus`.

There are two required folder that needs to be there:

* `/etc/janus/apis` - Holds all API definitions
* `/etc/janus/auth` - Holds all your Auth servers configurations

## 4. Adding a new endpoint and authentication

To add a new endpoint or authentication you can see the [Add Endpoint tutorial](https://motivlabs.gitbook.io/janus/quick_start/add_endpoint) but instead of using the admin API you'll add your configuration to a file and reload the docker instance:

```bash
docker-compose reload janus
```