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1.6 API Tools

Outline

  • Chrome Extensions
    • JSONView -> insert anchor links to lower sections
    • POSTMAN
  • Command line tools
    • curl
    • resty
  • Online tools
    • Apiary - An API Documentation Tool
    • Swagger - API Documentation and Editing Tools
    • Runscope - An API Monitoring Tool, useful for CI
    • MuleSoft - An API Services company, providing design, monitoring, and training services and resources

Chrome Extensions

JSONView

Makes reading JSON in the browser much, much easier. Lets go ahead and install this.

Postman

A tool that makes it easy to explore, test and experiment with APIs in the browser or as a desktop app. Provides integration with Newman, a command line API testing tool.

Note: One easy way to prevent your personal Chrome extensions and settings from interfering with your daily development workflow is to use two different Chrome installations. The Canary channel version of Chrome may not be 100% stable for daily browsing, but it has the latest dev tools updates and makes for a fine development browser. To keep things visually distinct, you might apply a different theme to your Canary browser. Atlantic Canary is a simple theme that follows the yellow aesthetic of Canary.

Command line tools (Bonus Content)

curl

curl curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax. It is very flexible and gives you a great deal of flexibility when sending URL requests.

curl http://USERNAME.drupal.4kclass.com/api/blogposts

useful Flags -X, --request <command> Send a specific request method.

curl -X OPTIONS http://USERNAME.drupal.4kclass.com/api/blogposts

-i, --include Include header in output.

curl -X OPTIONS -i http://USERNAME.drupal.4kclass.com/api/blogposts

-O, --remote-name Save the output into a file named after the url.

curl -X OPTIONS -i -O http://USERNAME.drupal.4kclass.com/api/blogposts

-u, --user <user:password> Send a username and password.

curl -u fk:fkbuild http://USERNAME.drupal.4kclass.com/api/blogposts

There are many, many more options available that will allow very powerful manipulations how requests to URLs are crafted.

Resty

A really useful little wrapper for curl that makes life easier when working with an API.

It's really simple to install:

$ curl -L http://github.com/micha/resty/raw/master/resty > resty

Then source the script

$ . resty

Now just set the REST host to your api endpoint.

$ resty http://vagrant.restful.local.dev:8080/api

Now you can make REST requests on the commandline.

$ GET /

Well that isn't terribly pretty, now is it? There are some ways using python and perl that make it easy to pretty print, but they are hard to remember.

$ brew install yajl

or

$ sudo apt-get install yajl-tools

Now you can pretty print with a command that is easy to remember.

$ GET / | json_reformat

More info on Resty

More info on pretty printing JSON