Restrek

Restrek is a simple yet powerful API tool.

Installation

git clone git@github.com:gsuntres/restrek.git
cd restrek
make install

Initialize a project

Create a directory for your project

mkdir myproject
cd myproject
restrek-init

Note: Check out the sandbox-project to quickly run and evaluate the sample project created by restrek-ini.

By inspecting the newly created project directory's structure, you'll notice that it has three main directories: the commands, the plans, and the envs directory.

Commands

Commands directory contains the API call definitions, which can be found in the above-mentioned sandbox-project: check, post_call, and delete_call.

commands/group1/check.yml

name: Check if API is alive
http: 
  url: /check

commands/group1/post.yml

name: A post call that receives a payload and returns it
http: 
  url: /post_call
  method: POST

commands/group1/delete.yml

name: Delete an entity by id
http: 
  url: /delete_call/{{ delete__id }}
  method: DELETE

Name is a brief description of the call and http specifies which module to use. The module http has a number of properties namely:

• host - the target host (default: localhost)
• secure - is the target host secure or not (default: false)
• timeout - timeout in milliseconds (default: 1000)
• url - the url path (default: /)
• method: GET, POST, etc (default: GET)
• headers: define headers to use in requests
• ssl_verify: should verify certificates (default: true)

Since most properties are the same between commands, common ones like host, secure, headers, etc can be defined in a separate file called properties. You'll find more details about that in the next section.

Environments

Predefined variables and the properties files exist in the target's environment directory. If no environment is specified the devel is assumed. If needed we can add more environments like staging by simply creating the corresponding directory. Variables can be literals, objects, or arrays and can be segregated into multiple files.

properties

This file contains properties shared between commands. Going back to our sandbox example the properties file is as follows:

---
debug: True

http:
  host: localhost
  headers:
    "Content-Type": application/json;charset=utf-8
    "Accept": application/json;charset=utf-8

The http specifies which properties to use when the http module is being used. This means that all the commands will also be using properties defined here.

overriding properties

Although the main properties are defined in the environment's directory, they can be overridden when placed in a command's group directory. For example, you can use commands that use different hosts. Such functionality is useful when dealing with micro-services or 3rd party apis such as an API gateway.

Plans

Here is where the action begins! A plan can have one or multiple commands, and they serve a dual role. They can be used to run a single command to test and evaluate the call being implemented, but they can also contain a series of steps to test business logic, etc.

In our example running restrek-console will bring up the main console where we can list and run our plans. Running list groups will return all available plan groups and list plans all available plans. You can run one or more plans by simply issuing a run command followed by the plans fully qualified names, separated by a space, in our example run group1.test_api.

plans and steps explained

Plans use one or more steps to accomplish their goals. Steps have three main parameters command, register and tests. Under the hood, the command is being executed, and its output becomes available to the rest of the parameters, the tests, a list of assertions, run and finally the register assigns values to new or existing variables. Both register and tests have access to the command's output. The output of a command that uses the http module has the following structure:

• status - the http status code returned
• body - the body returned. Note: if it's json is being parsed and returned as an object otherwise as a raw string
• headers - a dictionary with the response's headers
• cookies - a dictionary with the response's cookies

So if we need, for example, to save the entity's name, we've just retrieved, we would do the following:

- command: mygroup.retrieve_entity
  register:
    myentity_name: body['name']
  tests:
  - assert_eq(200, status)

Now myentity_name is defined and globally available.

It is worth mentioning that register can be used alone within a step, usually to assign fixed values, like so

- register:
    entity_status: active
- command: mygrou.retrieve_entity_by_status

mygroup/retrieve_entity_by_status

name: Retrieve entity by status
http:
  url: /entity/{{ entity_status }}

Lastly, we can use the skip parameter to skip a step, e.g.

- command: mygroup.retrieve_entity
  register:
    myentity_name: body['name']
  tests:
  - assert_eq(200, status)
  skip: yes

Restrek as a testing tool

When running the command restrek from within your project's root directory, the tool searches the plans directory for plans with test_ as a prefix and executes them. The execution can be farther refined by using the Trekfile file.