API test tool. No not CURL

Software Development
1

I used to use postman but that seems to becoming more and more a paid product?

Is there any proper opensource/free alternatives out there people can vouch for?

2

From what I understood, Hoppscotch was kind of trying to be an open source postman option.

GitHub: GitHub - hoppscotch/hoppscotch: đź‘˝ Open source API development ecosystem - https://hoppscotch.io

2 Likes
3

What do you mean “not cURL” ?! :grin:

For quick and dirty testing I’ve used that, or HTTPie which allows for a richer CLI experience.

I was recently impressed to see SoapUI still kicking too. Hadn’t used it in anger for years but I got right back into the groove and did some complex API discovery and state manipulation.

4

Hoppscotch looks nice. I’ll try to keep in mind next time I need to mess around with an API that doesn’t provide something like Swagger.

In terms of creating a test suite for doing a range of tests against an API, using Python with pytest and httpx might be worth a look. I was recently trying to re-implement an API that wasn’t well documented and used them to code up a bunch test cases to document the behaviour of the various endpoints (which I could then also use to validate my own implementation). Test cases are pretty simple:

def test_authenticate():
    response = httpx.post(
        f'{API_BASE}/api/v1/authenticate',
        json={
            'user': {
                'login': 'testuser',
                'password': 'sekret',
            },
        },
    )

    assert response.status_code == 200
    assert response.json() == {
        'username': 'testeuser',
        'token': 'some_random_token',
    }

Using pytest’s parametrize feature you can create a bunch of very similar tests with slight differences without needing to copy and paste a bunch of boilerplate code.

5

Do you use vscode? I’ve started using the thunder client extension. Seems to be quite good