Ministry of Testing 99 Minute Workshop - Build an API and API Testing Framework from Scratch in 120 Minutes

Hello! If you are reading this you likely are interested in or attending my Ministry of Testing Workshop called "Build an API and API Testing Framework from Scratch in 120 Minutes". This is part of the workshop "API Testing and Monitoring". If you are not attending my workshop or not interested in API building and testing, then I hope you enjoy this repository nonetheless.

The structure of this repository contains

• A simple Flask application for creating a "Sauce Log", a database for a list of hot sauces and their descriptions, and
• A fairly simple API test framework written using pytest and requests.

The workshop shall walk through the API app and test framework.

Before You Start

This is a Python project, so you will need Python 3.7+ installed on your machine. An IDE such as PyCharm or VS Code is recommended.

The Layout of the Workshop

The workshop at SauceCon - which you should totally check out - will walk through developing this Flask app and in turn developing an API test framework for it. This is done using some tags. Here's what each tag will show:

• v1-starting Creating an initial app with a single endpoint
• v2-post-get Creating two endpoints that allow POST and GET requests
• v3-flask-restful Adding in Flask-Restful, a library for writing REST APIs
• v4-add-db Implementing a SQL database to maintain app state and data
• t1-entries-test Writing our first test
• t2-entry-tests Writing some more complex tests
• t3-api-wrapper Looking for patterns and making a lightweight test framework
• t4-api-utilities From good to great

Installing And Setting up the Project

Please clone this repo since there are some tags that are used for the workshop. You can also download the ZIP file of this repo to work with the final product.

Virtual Environment

To install the product, first create a Python virtual environment by running this in the directory you just cloned:

python3 -m venv venv

then activate the virtual environment. If you are using Mac/Linux, use the following command to active your Virtual Environment:

source venv/bin/activate 

If you are using Windows, use the following command to active your Virtual Environment:

.\venv\bin\Activate.psl

Your terminal should have (venv) at the start of it once the virtual environment is activated. You can also use PyCharm to handle virtual environments.

Installing Dependencies

To install dependencies, run

pip install -r requirements.txt

You should be ready to go!

Starting the Flask App

If you like skipping ahead, you can initialize the database and start the app by running the following commands (note the order, which is important):

python create_db.py
gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:5000 main:app &

This will start the app locally on port 5000. You can check that this is up and running by executing

curl http://localhost:5000/sauce_logs

in a terminal window or pasting

http://localhost:5000/sauce_logs

in a browser window such as Chrome or Firefox.

If you are unable to use gunicorn because you are on Windows or another platform not supported by it, you can also use the Flask development server by running:

FLASK_APP=main.py flask run

In either case, you should see a nice welcome message.

Running the API Tests

Once you have the app up and running, you can run the tests by executing

pytest

All tests should pass. If they do not, check that the app is running on port 5000.