26: pyresttest – Sam Van Oort

Interview with Sam Van Oort about pyresttest, "A REST testing and API microbenchmarking tool"

pyresttest

A question in the Test & Code Slack channel was raised about testing REST APIs. There were answers such as pytest + requests, of course, but there was also a mention of pyresttest, https://github.com/svanoort/pyresttest, which I hadn't heard of. I checked out the github repo, and was struck by how user friendly the user facing test definitions were. So I contacted the developer, Sam Van Oort, and asked him to come on the show and tell me about this tool and why he developed it.

Here's the "What is it?" section from the pyresttest README:

• A REST testing and API microbenchmarking tool
• Tests are defined in basic YAML or JSON config files, no code needed
• Minimal dependencies (pycurl, pyyaml, optionally future), making it easy to deploy on-server for smoketests/healthchecks
• Supports generate/extract/validate mechanisms to create full test scenarios
• Returns exit codes on failure, to slot into automated configuration management/orchestration tools (also supplies parseable logs)
• Logic is written and extensible in Python

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