Overview

tcli is a test client to help interact with services via openapi spec files. For general build and run instructions, please see how to build and run

Features

• Data driven modules.
  • Customize test flows with context sensitive modules.
• Api specs driven by openapi.
  • Create similar config for all test interactions.
• Integrated jq via gojq to eliminate extra tools.
  • Minimal process spawns in test flows reduces test time.
• Individual parallelism control for pipeline elements.
  • Simpler and quick stress tests.
• Meaningful feature tests via shell pipelines.
  • Composeability allows seamless feature tests with multiple apis.
  • Eg: Generate test data | Create | Get | Update | Delete | Verify

Quick How to

tcli is designed to do feature testing including setup, test, validation and teardown intuitively via a concise shell pipeline.

Imagine a standard CRUD api. tcli tests can be done as follows (ideally)

tcli testdata get -count 100 \
  | tcli api create \
  | tcli api get \
  | tcli api update -body '{..update}' \
  | tcli api delete \
  | tcli api get -status_code 404

Working example

While the above example is possible, let us look at a real world scenario. We will use petstore example from https://petstore.swagger.io/

petstore is a sample module included as it is familiar to developers as a swagger example. Please see modules on how to manage modules.

Here is working test code that stays true to the above ideal scenario. Note how this approach reduces need for external tools to transform output from one command to fit input for the next command.

tcli utils echo -format 'range(1;2) | {body: {id:.,name:.|tostring,photourls:[.|tostring]}}' \
  | tcli petstore pet addPet -format '{petId:.id}' \
  | tcli petstore pet getPetById -format '{petId:.id,api_key:.id}' \
  | tcli petstore pet deletePet -format '{petId:.message}' \
  | tcli petstore pet getPetById -status_code 404

{"code":1,"type":"error","message":"Pet not found"}

Look in the examples folder for all examples.

For a step by step explanation of how the above test works, See step by step explanation Refer how to build and run if you have trouble building.

Where to go from here

If you are still interested, please go through docs to find ways to combine tcli for meaningful tests. To find even more sophisticated uses of tcli, see stress test with tcli

Areas we need help with

• openapi parsing is not complete and does not address all versions.

  • json path processing is not implemented.
  • maybe it is better to delegate spec parsing to another library. tcli was built to work with openapi specs from projects it was used to test. It did not have a reason to expand out. If you are looking to contribute, this is an area that can use your help.

• -format does not handle input beyond simple one level input like 5, {"data":5} etc. If fully supported for multi-level json input, the -format feature can be much more versatile.

References

• How to build and run
• Explanation of test code
• Examples
• Formatting output
  • jq lang
  • gojq use as library