In the last section, we were centered in the E2E testing of our entire application starting from the frontend, but what about our API itself? Remember that one API can be used to serve many client types such as web or mobile. So, don't you think it would be awesome to ensure this functionality independently from the entire application life cycle? Sure, we know you agree, and we have in mind a very nice solution to accomplish this objective—Swagger.
Swagger is a specification and a nice group of tools to write RESTful APIs. Based on their own web page definition:
"Swagger is the world’s largest framework of API developer tools for the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), enabling development across the entire API life cycle, from design and documentation, to test and deployment."
In the group of tools we have in Swagger, we can find these:
- Swagger Editor: This tool will allow us to view the updated document in real time.
- Swagger Codegen: A template-driven engine to generate interactive documents.
- Swagger UI: Allows to visualize the RESTful API, and check input and responses. So, Swagger UI takes an existing JSON or YAML document and creates interactive documentation.