API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface. It is a set of rules that allow programs to talk to each other. APIs are used to aid server-client communication.
REST determines how the API looks like. It stands for “REpresentational State Transfer”. It is a set of rules that developers follow when they create their API. One of these rules states that you should be able to get a piece of data (called a resource) when you link to a specific URL.
Each URL is called a Request while the data sent back to you is called a Response.
These are the Request Methods:
- GET: Used to access a resource
- POST: Used to create information
- PUT: Used to update a resource
- DELETE: Used to delete a resource
To learn more about APIs, I recommend the following resources:
- I have prepared a PPT which helps understand more about APIs. Check it out here!
- REST APIs are a powerful way to run tests and TestProject provides you with an Addon for RESTful API testing capabilities. The API Addon utilizes TestProject as a functional testing platform to create more powerful testing while combining API steps with functional UI test automation. The RESTful API Addon provides actions to send HTTP/S requests using GET, POST, PUT and DELETE methods. It is open source and you can tweak or update it according to your specific requirements to enhance it further 🚀
- For a complete API Testing Glossary, check out this list of definitions by Dave Westerveld!
- Prashant Hedge also wrote a tutorial to master API Test Automation in 10 mins you should definitely check out!
Note: This tutorial has been submitted as part of the TestProject Master Program – I invite you all to take part, contribute to the community and get really cool gifts and certificates! 👌
Table of Contents
- What is API and REST API
- Learn how to Automate REST API Testing
- Where to start? Postman!
- Writing Tests
- Create a Collection of API Calls
- Running the Collection via Command Prompt with Newman Plugin
- Summarizing Guide for Creating and Maintaining automated API tests: Step-by-step flowchart guide!
Learn How to Automate REST API Testing
List of APIs used for creating automated tests
GET http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/employees
POST http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/create
PUT http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/update/{{employeeId}}
DELETE http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/delete/{{employeeId}}
Definitions for the above APIs can be found here: http://dummy.restapiexample.com/
First, you need to list down the user flow which has to be automated. In our case, the scenario we are going to automate is:
- Get Full Employee List and Validate the first employee name [This is not necessary for our user flow, just added as a bonus 😉].
- Create a new Employee record and validate the record.
- Update the created employee record and validate the changes.
- Verify that the changes are reflected in the employee record.
- Delete the employee record and validate it.
- Verify that the deleted employee is removed from records.
Where To Start? Postman!
- Click on the Settings icon on the top right corner of Postman.
- Click on ‘Add’ from Manage Environments popup.
- Add Environment name and variable details (here we specify the URL as a variable) in order to make our API scripts reusable across different environments.
- Select the corresponding environment created from the select environment dropdown next to the settings icon.
- Now, from our main URL: http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/employees, we can replace the API address to the variable created. For example: {{url}}/api/v1/employees [Same goes for all API requests].
Writing Tests
After specifying the URL and selecting the method we can create a test script to validate our response code & response data.
In this example, we will be adding scripts for validating the response code of request and verifying the employee name for the first record:
pm.test("Status code is 200", function () {
pm.response.to.have.status(200);
});
pm.test("Check First Employee name", function () {
var jsonData = pm.response.json();
for(var i=0; i<jsonData.data.length; i++)
{
if (jsonData.data[i].employee_name==="Tiger Nixon")
{
pm.expect(jsonData.data[i].id).to.equal("1")
}
}
});
This is how our first test looks like in Postman:
Click on Send and check the result of our test: Status of the test will be displayed in Test Results section. Try changing the expected code value to anything other than 200 and check the result. Failed, right? 🧐
Now that you’ve seen how to create a test to validate your request, let’s move to automation! Testing several API requests one by one can become a repetitive and tiring task, hence we need to automate our API tests.
Create a Collection of API Calls
A collection is a place where you will group all your API calls. After creating the environment click again on New >> Collection give a name and add a description (Optional) to your collection and then click on create.
Once this is done, you can import a file, import a folder, import from a link or paste the JSON Raw Text, for testing purposes we will be using the following collection as our reference:
https://www.getpostman.com/collections/c4dd41bc0c91b3bc79b4
In this collection, I already added some tests for all the API requests which we can map to the scenarios which we discussed in “The scenario we are going to automate” section above. Once the automated test cases have been defined within each request and all requests are ready, we will use Runner as a way to make all calls at once. If you imported correctly, 6 calls will appear within our request, as seen in the image below:
Now, Click on “Runner” which will be opened in a new window. Then specify the collection to be executed (collection imported in the previous steps), select the Environment created previously, the number of Iterations that defines how many times the collection will be executed and finally click on RUN. Here is the Postman Runner Window:
In the end, reports of each execution are displayed, as well as the tests that have passed and/or failed. You can also re-run the tests, create a new run or export your results. In the image below you can see Postman’s execution result:
Running the Collection via Command Prompt with Newman Plugin
Now let’s go a little further and run it using Newman if you intend to use your tests together with any continuous integration tool, for example, Jenkins. Newman works similarly to Postman but is run via the command line, that is, in the terminal, you will be able to run your tests using npm commands.
Installation & run commands can be referred to here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/newman.
The first thing that needs to be done is to export your collection, Select Collection v2 and then click on export, give a short name to avoid typing a very big name. It will download a JSON file with all the items in the collection we selected. Also, download the environment from Manage Environment popup:
Open terminal and install newman using the command: npm install -g newman, then navigate to the location where the JSON (collection) file is saved.
For executing, enter the command “newman run employee_data.json -e demo-data.json” In which “employee_data.json” is the collection and “demo-data.json” is the environment JSON downloaded earlier.
All the test results, the number of iterations used, the number of requests, test scripts and validated assertions will be displayed in the terminal on executing the command:
You can also export your results to html, for this we need to install “newman-reporter-html”, and execute “newman run employee_data.json -e demo-data.json -r html” which will generate HTML report in the same folder where the collection is exported inside a folder called newman.
The API Collection, Environment JSON & Newman report generated can be accessed from my GitHub repository: https://github.com/nithin-cy/PostmanDemo.git
Summarizing Guide for Creating and Maintaining automated API tests
This is just basics so expect more to come in upcoming articles… 🤯
I’d like to conclude this REST API Testing tutorial with the following flowchart I’ve made to help you create and maintain your automates API testing efforts:
Happy Coding! 😃
Nice Overview Nithin!!