Test

The best GUI tool to test RESTful API is Postman and the best command line tool is curl.

Postman is very easy to set headers and other parameters and save the configuration for future usage. If you have a lot of endpoints, it is highly recommended to save all of them as a project so that these endpoints can be easily retrieved.

Some people like curl command line and it works as well. In most of the cases, you should have a file to save the curl commands so that you don’t need to reconstruct command each time. Here is one example to access one of the endpoints petstore serves.

curl -k https://localhost:8443/v2/pet/111

Note that -k is to disable the tls certificate verification as we are using a self-signed certificate on the server. The generated server.yml only enables https by default.

And the result looks like this. This is the generated example response based on swagger specification.

{
                "photoUrls" : [ "aeiou" ],
                "name" : "doggie",
                "id" : 123456789,
                "category" : {
                  "name" : "aeiou",
                  "id" : 123456789
                },
                "tags" : [
                  {
                    "name" : "aeiou",
                    "id" : 123456789
                  }
                ],
                "status" : "aeiou"
              }

Now, let’s test the server with an url that is not defined in the specification.

curl -k https://localhost:8443/abc

And the result is:

{"statusCode":404,"code":"ERR10007","message":"INVALID_REQUEST_PATH","description":"Request path cannot be found in the spec."}

In fact, the specification is loaded into the service instance by the light-rest-4j framework at runtime and there is a module called Swagger Validator that does the validation against specification for headers, query parameters, uri parameters and body. It also supports validation using JSON schema with an independent library json-schema-validator.

Now the server is up and running, let’s update generated config files to enable more features. First let’s enable security with OAuth 2.0 JWT token verification as built-in microservices security set us apart from other microservices frameworks.