webspicy

Webspicy

A specification and test framework for web services seen as black-box software operations. Webspicy yields a better test coverage for a smaller testing effort.

See webspicy in action and make the tutorial on https://yourbackendisbroken.dev

Have a look at doc/*.md for vocabulary and vision as well as ROADMAP.md.

Features

• Declarative specification of HTTP web services + their tests

• Framework/language agnostic: webspicy is written in Ruby, but can be used to test web services for backends written in any language / framework.

• Black box testing: webspicy focuses on web services seen as blackboxes. It has no knowledge of the implementation, and focuses on HTTP and input/output data instead. Investing in such testing makes those tests more stable and your API design better.

• Formal and human-friendly data schema with strong data matching semantics, thanks to http://finitio.io

• Test instrumentation and generation, based on PRE & POST contracts.

• Extra goodness for Rubyists: being written in ruby, webspicy also supports testing Rack applications directly (through rack/test), which boosts the test suite.

• Extra goodies: when a specification is written, it can also be used for mocking the API, generating an openapi file, etc.

Is this used on real-world cases?

Yes, webspicy is currently used on a dozen production components. Our biggest specification has 324 specification files for thousands of tests, 35% of them being generated.

Getting started with the commandline

To install webspicy on your developer computer, install ruby then:

gem install webspicy

Then execute webspicy help to see the options.

webspicy --help

Using the docker image(s)

If you just want to play with the commandline tool without having to install ruby & webspicy, you can use the docker image we provide for the commandline:

docker run enspirit/webspicy --help

If you have a specification & test suite somewhere, an easy way to run the whole suite (or integrate it in your continuous integration pipeline) is to use our :tester docker image. Just mount your test suite as a volume in /home/app and you are good to go:

docker run -v path/to/tests:/formalspec enspirit/webspicy:tester

If your plan is to test a backend that runs on your own machine (vs. publicly on the Internet or inside the default docker network), you will need to add some networking option, as shown below. Please refer to Docker documentation.

docker run -v path/to/tests:/formalspec --network=host enspirit/webspicy:tester

Contributing

Please use github issues for questions and bugs, and pull requests for submitting improvement proposals and new features.

Contributors

• Bernard Lambeau (blambeau)
• Louis Lambeau (llambeau)
• Yoann Guyot (ygu)
• Felix Holmgren (@felixyz)

Enspirit (https://enspirit.be) and Klaro App (https://klaro.cards) are both actively using, contributing and funding work on this library. Please contact Bernard Lambeau for any question.

Licence

Webspicy is distributed under a MIT Licence, by Enspirit SRL.