Hypertest DSL

Domain-Specific Language for testing APIs, hypermedia-style

❗ Early version; work in progress 🚧

Introduction

Hypertest DSL is a tool which lets API authors build end-to-end testing suites as a series of client-server interactions which resemble the implementation of a hypermedia-driven applications.

In other words, the tests are solely executing based on links and forms, all of which should be provided by the server in resoruce representations.

The DSL itself aims to be agnostic of the media type. A test runner could be implemented to run against any RESTful API such as SIREN, Hydra, NARWHL, HAL-FORMS, etc.

Quick start

Tests are written down as .api files. Here's an all too-simple test document:

# tests/scenario.api

With Class "Person" {
  Expect Property "name"
} 

It will instruct the runner to check that any ocurrence of the Person class has a name property.

More examples are available on testing.hypermedia.app.

Install compiler

Runners will work with a JSON representation of the test documents. A compiler can be used to transform the .api files to JSON:

npm i -g @hydrofoil/hypertest

Run it by passing a directory. You may try it on the samples directory in this repository:

hypertest-compiler ./api-example

It will produce a .api.json for each test scenario document.

Developing and running locally

Setting up development environment

The DSL and compiler are implemented in Java using Xtext.

• Make sure to install EditorConfig plugin. For example this one
• npm install to set up git hooks
• Install a Java JDK (Java 8)
• Install Eclipse IDE for Java and DSL Developers. Version 2019.03. Newer may not work.
• (In Eclipse) Add git repo:
  • Show the "Git Repositories" view: Window | Show View | Other... | Git | Git Repositories
  • Add git repo: Add an (existing) Repository in the "Git Repositories" view
    • Select ~/git/hypertest, Add
• (In Eclipse) Import Projects: File | Import ... | Git | Projects from Git, Next
  • Select Existing local repository, Next
  • Select hypertest, Next
  • Select Import existing Eclipse Projects and verify that the Working Tree top-node is selected, Next
  • Verify that all projects are selected, Finish

The projects should now be imported and the build finish without errors.

Run simple web editor

Follow the instructions from this blog post to set up a local Tomcat instance running the Language Server and simple web UI.

Running locally

Easiest way to build a running compiler is to build with Maven from command line and have jDeploy wire up an executable in local bin path:

npm i -g jdeploy
mvn package
jdeploy install
hypertest-compiler api-examples

Publishing a newer version to NPM

@hydrofoil/hypertest is published using jDeploy which packages the executable JAR in an easy to use node package.

npm run release
git push --follow-tags origin master

Travis does the rest.