Services are a set of reusable functions. They are particularly useful to respect the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) programming concept and to simplify [controllers](./controllers.md) logic.
## Core services
When you create a new `Content Type` or a new model, you will see a new empty service has been created. It is because Strapi builds a generic service for your models by default and allows you to override and extend it in the generated files.
### Extending a Model Service
Here are the core methods (and their current implementation).
You can simply copy and paste this code to your own service file to customize the methods.
You can read about `strapi.query` calls [here](./queries.md).
::: tip
In the following example your controller, service and model are named `restaurant`.
You can also create custom services to build your own business logic.
### How to create a custom service
There are two ways to create a service.
- Using the CLI `strapi generate:service restaurant`.<br>Read the [CLI documentation](../cli/CLI.md) for more information.
- Manually create a JavaScript file named in `./api/**/services/`.
#### Example
The goal of a service is to store reusable functions. An `email` service could be useful to send emails from different functions in our codebase:
**Path —** `./api/email/services/Email.js`.
```js
const nodemailer = require('nodemailer');
// Create reusable transporter object using SMTP transport.
const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
service: 'Gmail',
auth: {
user: 'user@gmail.com',
pass: 'password',
},
});
module.exports = {
send: (from, to, subject, text) => {
// Setup e-mail data.
const options = {
from,
to,
subject,
text,
};
// Return a promise of the function that sends the email.
return transporter.sendMail(options);
},
};
```
::: tip
please make sure you installed `nodemailer` (`npm install nodemailer`) for this example.
:::
The service is now available through the `strapi.services` global variable. We can use it in another part of our codebase. For example a controller like below: