Testing the Swagger Petstore: Manually Testing An API Using Swagger UI

With the last post, Testing the Swagger Petstore: Reviewing API Documentation Formatted in OpenAPI 3.0 with Swagger UI we started exploring an API with Swagger UI, such as the Swagger Petstore at https://petstore3.swagger.io/

Here, we will start exploring how to test an API using the Swagger UI.

The tests we can run are:

• Happy Path Testing, checking the Positive Scenarios
• Negative Testing, reviewing the Invalid Inputs & Error Handling
• Boundary & Edge Case Testing, checking how the API handles the extreme limits of allowed input ranges
• Authentication & Authorization Testing
• Contract and schema validation

We can see in the Swagger PetStore there are three tag groups: Pet, Store, and User. 

Because this is a Swagger UI doc, we can perform manual testing using only the "Try it out" feature in Swagger UI. No external tools needed! Live HTTP requests can be executed directly from your browser.

Testing the Swagger Petstore: Reviewing API Documentation Formatted in OpenAPI 3.0 with Swagger UI

For this next project, we will be examining the test site Swagger Petstore - OpenAPI 3.0 at https://petstore3.swagger.io/

https://petstore3.swagger.io/

If we wanted to really dive deep into creating API documentation, we could use:

• I'dRatherBeWriting's Free Documenting APIs course, showing an Introduction to REST APIs, using APIs like a developer, Documenting API endpoints, the Open API spec, Testing API docs, Publishing API docs, and more... 

... But that goes too deep for this blog post. 

Before we begin, let's get into some background information. 

What is Swagger?

According to OpenAPISpec.com's article, Who Created Swagger?, Swagger was created in 2010 by Tony Tam, the CTO of Wordnik, an online dictionary company that leveraged so many APIs, it was difficult for the six person engineering team to manage and scale them, writing API-clients and documentation by hand. After a 3 AM conversation, they thought... what if the API documentation could describe itself?