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RESTest

The RESTest manual

This manual takes you from never having used RESTest to testing your own API with it, and to having your continuous integration do it for you. It is meant to be read from the beginning: each chapter builds on the one before, and every example in it is one you can run yourself.

The reference pages are the other half of the documentation. They are where to look something up — every option, every line a run prints, every key of its report — and the chapters here point to them rather than repeat them.

Chapters

Section titled “Chapters”
  1. What RESTest is for — the problem it solves, what it finds, and what it does not.
  2. Installing RESTest — with Homebrew, with jbang, with Docker, with Java, or built from the source.
  3. A first run — a practice API on your own machine, and the first run against it.
  4. Reading what a run says — the screen, the report, and the questions you can ask of them.
  5. Plans — where a run's values come from, how hard it pushes, and which operations it may touch.
  6. Dictionaries — handing over values you know are good.
  7. Settings — how the tool itself behaves, and switching off what it does.
  8. An API that asks for a key — handing over a key or a token.
  9. Exit codes and continuous integration — what a run ends with, and using that in a build.
  10. Troubleshooting — what to do when a run does not do what you expected.
  11. Glossary — the words this manual uses.

Before you start, at the end of the first chapter, says what you need and how the examples are written. The manual of a release is this folder at the release's tag: choose the tag on GitHub, or check it out, and read the same files.