API testing is extremely important to ensure your application’s business logic or the functionality of the APIs are working properly as well as to ensure they are performant and secure.
Some of the advantages of doing API testing:
Early application access: You can start testing the APIs the moment they are built without having to wait for the UI layer to be ready
Test speed: API automation testing is a lot quicker and covers more application ground in less time compared to browser testing
Easier to maintain: If you’ve worked on browser tests then you probably are aware of with some of the pain points around flaky tests. With API tests, you don’t have to worry about that as tests are a lot more stable and consistent (most of the times)
There are primarily two ways of performing API testing:
Manual: by using tools like Postman or any other API console
Automation: programmatically running your API tests using the programming language of your preference
In this tutorial series, we will walk through both the options but mainly focusing on the latter option (Automation)
Some of the items we will be covering in this series:
Basics
What is an API?
What is REST API?
Different types of API Methods
What contains in an API Request?
What is API testing and the advantages of API testing
What technologies we will be using for API testing
Installation / Configuration
Write API automation tests with Javascript
using Mocha, Chai JS, and SuperTest HTTP Library
Scale API automation test framework
Learn how hooks work and when to use it
Write some negative tests to increase our test coverage
Generate fake test data to make tests more dynamic
Generate HTML reports using Mochawesome reporter
Integrate tests with Jenkins
and a lot more…
I will be uploading new content every week on each of the above topics, so Subscribe to my YouTube channel to get notified of new videos 👍