A quick journey through API Testing

From Node Application to Postman best practices through Gherkin features

This repository is the one for the book "A quick journey through API Testing. From Node Application to Postman best practices through Gherkin features" written by Bruno Flaven.

The book can be found on Amazon at this address: A quick journey through API Testing. From Node Application to Postman best practices through Gherkin features (English Edition)

Introduction

I discovered through my job, the requirement to make tests both from a technical and a content point of view. For anyone who is running an API centric ecosystem of website, applications, third-parties, partners... Testing is a prerequisite. For me, learning testing has been a long and tedious process of a progressive discovery of tools, mindset, technology that enable API testing. At the end of this process, I have decided to compile all my investigations into a book named "A quick journey through API Testing. From Node Application to Postman best practices through Gherkin features"

This repository must be seen next to the book as I give much more explanations for each part of the scripts.

Here 3 elements extracted from the book: The node's application, the Foreword and the Table Of Contents to spur your curiosity. Remember, this book has been written for non-developers as API testing is at the crossroad of marketing, editorial and technical issue and is the main guarantee for quality.

Application FlagApi

The application used in this book is made with Node. I have called it FlagApi. Inspired by an open source project named restcountries.eu, I have leveraged on it application to insert flags. It is all about countries.

https://github.com/bflaven/FlagApi

Clone and Start the application

If you already have NPM install and known how to clone

$ cd /path-to-your-where-you-want-to-create-your-app/
$ git clone https://github.com/bflaven/FlagApi.git FlagApi-v2
$ cd FlagApi-v2
$ npm install
$ npm start

Foreword

It makes few months that I am working with Postman, first to learn how Postman works and how can I use it as a tool for testing especially an API that feeds mobile applications. I read a lot of resources regarding this subject and here is a synthesis of what I learned.

As a reminder, my objective was to convince a non-developer to resort to tests at an early stage in the development of an API-centric digital product e.g. Desktop, Mobile Application… etc.

In the meantime, I had to figure out what API can I use to illustrate the tests creation's process. For this part, that’s my son who has given me the idea of the API that will be used to illustrate this book. Just to make it short, we are sometimes playing with a cards game with country’s flags. So, I have decided to create an API that contains all countries with all information that can be useful including flags.

The idea was to create a real MVP of an API plus the tests that insure the quality of the content exposed and explore the ability of Postman/Newman to test it. My approach is that for each end-point, I had to think at the same time to the test that validates this new feature and its content.

I found an open source project named restcountries.eu and leveraged on this application to insert flag in it. At the very beginning, I have called it fl@g@pi and finally renamed to flagapi with no "at sign" @, as the @ is too hard to cut and paste. My purpose is to be able to test the main end-points of this new application.

So basically, my TodoList has become the plan of this book.

All the content of this book is available on github in my account https://github.com/bflaven/a-quick-journey-through-api-testing

Table Of Contents

• Introduction

  • Foreword

• Install the environment

  • Let's be prepared
  • Install Homebrew
  • Install Node & NPM
  • Install Postman
  • Install Newman
  • Few lines about Newman usage
  • Few other tools

• Create an API with node

  • Launch in the basic app
  • Some changes in the basic app

• Write Gherkin Features

  • Quick intro to features

• Basic Tests JavaScript

  • Custom Code vs PM API
  • Make the script works or fails
  • Fuzzy Refinements

• Intermediate Tests

  • Tests Great Evolution Gallery
  • Progressing in test writing
  • Shrinking the code with functions

• Advanced Tests NPM

  • Using MPM to launch tests

• CI Jenkins-Newman

  • Newman take-away : using the —folder parameter
  • Make the couple Jenkins-Newman works

• Conclusion

  • End of the journey

• Resources

  • Some Resources

• Lexicon

  • Some Definitions