fact-checker

Fact-checker

A down to earth tool for API test

A bit of history

This tool was born using dead time at office, trying to ease colleagues from manual testing REST APIs. There were special needs for this tool:

1. Write as less as possible to configure tests
2. Have a solid copy of input sent to server
3. It had to be ready and usable ASAP

The approach used

Fact-checker is a test generator; it generates JSON input files to be sent to server and a testSuite file which can be run by mocha. This testSuite iteratively send JSON inputs from files to server and checks chunk of output retrieved by mean of deep equality using jsonpath expressions.

How does it works

TL;DR; see working example here (download dependencies and run npm test)

A template is defined in test/default.json. It includes a requestOption field which contains options to be passed to request when sending data to server and a body field which contains a shallow payload with defaults. From these defaults and a conf file located in test/tests.json the testSuite is generated. test/tests.json is an array of test definitions; each test definition includes a title (string containing at least one '_': the preceeding part is used to populate describe), a requestOptions object to be merged with defaults, an inputs array setting variables in the default tree and a checks array of pairs jsonpath expression/expected result (note: just the first result wil be used for a deep equality comparison with expected result). Both test/default.json and test/tests.json can use json5 extensions (such as comments). As a clean is performed before generation of new files commenting test definition works as a way to avoid test/output files generation.

Usage

Just run $ fact-checker with files in place.

TODO

• better error handling
• support commandLine options