In this tutorial we will explain Swagger API Testing.
1. Introduction
The OpenAPI specification defines the standard of describing HTTP API for any project. This is programming-language agnostic. This helps humans and computers to know about the System/API without the need to look into the code. If the specification is properly implemented it helps a consumer to understand the interaction with the remote system effectively without much hassle.
OpenAPI specification can be compared to an Interface in Java. Interfaces in Java define the contract between the client and the server. It tells the caller what it needs to send and the expected value which will be returned. This helps the caller to reduce the guesswork. Similarly, OpenAPI is a specification that defines how to document your HTTP API so that the consumer of your API has to do minimal guesswork.
One of the big use cases for a machine-readable API definition is to automatically generate the Client code. The OpenAPI documents are generally described in YAML or JSON. The best part is that these documents can be created statically or generated at runtime. One this to note is that OpenAPI can not be integrated with all the available HTPP API implementations – but they are available for RESTful HTTP Apis. The current version of OpenAPI specification is 3.1.0.
2. Swagger Inspector
You can use Swagger Inspector to validate and test your API without any need to download or set-up anything. You just need to have a browser to use the feature. The tests you run are saved – this helps to re-run them whenever we need. You can test you REST, SOAP or GraphQL API using Inspector.
Once you have tested and validated your API you can easily document it using the Swagger Instertor and Hub. Swagger Inspector helps you to create documentation from the test you have run before for validation. This documentation and definitions are hosted on the SwaggerHub.
If you want to read more about it you can look here.
3. Swagger API Testing – ReadyAPI
ReadyAPI empowers software teams with the ability to share testing projects and artifacts, report and resolve issues directly from the testing IDE, and share licenses between other team members. You can use the visual editor which makes testing quite easy. You can kick off your entire API testing suite with each commit, running tests on local environments, Docker containers, or other distributed staging environments. You can easily integrate it with Git and Jira. It provides native integrations with Jenkins, Maven, TeamCity, and other API lifecycle tools
4. Summary
In this article we looked at Swagger API testing tools. First we looked at what is OpenAPI spec and what it is used for. Then we looked at two of the most commonly used API testing tool for Swagger – Inspector and ReadyAPI. We discussed their benefits and how to use them.
