Instaunit tests your Web APIs

Instaunit is a tool that lets you write integration tests for REST and Websocket services declaratively and run them automatically. You can use Instaunit locally for development and on your CI infrastructure as part of your integration tests.

Instaunit manages the repetitive details of setting up and tearing down, executing requests and evaluating responses, which allows you to get more value out of your tests faster.

Since tests and documentation are naturally maintained in parallel, Instaunit can combine these two highly-related tasks into one: add optional usage descriptions to your tests and Instaunit can generate documentation for your endpoints, complete with examples.

Getting Started

Get up and running quickly with our Getting Started Tutorial.

Installing Instaunit

Installing via Homebrew on macOS

MacOS users can install the latest version of Instaunit via Homebrew by running the following command.

brew install bww/stable/instaunit

Other Installation Options

You can install Instaunit by:

• Downloading a binary release,
• Cloning this repo and building from source via: make install.

Writing Tests

Tests are described by a YAML-based document format. Just describe your request, the response you expect, and that's basically it. Here's a very simple test suite containing a single test case:

tests:
  -
    request: # The request to perform
      method: GET
      url: https://www.example.com/status
    response: # The response we expect to get
      status: 200
      entity: {"status": "Ok"}

Instaunit supports a lot of other request properties – from headers to authorization to parameter encoding – as well as a bunch of advanced features if you need them:

• Compare entities semantically to ignore insignificant differences like whitespace and map key order,
• Reference the output of previously-run tests to chain related tests together,
• Wait for dependency services to become available before a test suite starts running,
• Declare mock services so your tests avoid external dependencies without making code-level changes,
• Evaluate expressions and built-in functions to generate input and randomize your tests.
• Manage the process you're testing by starting it before tests are run and stopping it after tests have completed.

Running Tests

Tests can be run by pointing instaunit to a test suite document (or many of them).

Try running instaunit -h to view the options it supports.

$ instaunit test.yml
  ====> test.yml
  ----> GET https://www.example.com/status
        #1 Unexpected status code:
             expected: (int) 200
               actual: (int) 500

        #2 Entities do not match:
             -{"status": "Ok"}
             +{"status": "Not great"}

Producing Reports

Reports describing the results of your tests can be produced in addition to the information logged to standard output. Currently the JUnit report format is supported.

Try running instaunit -report <test_suite> to generate a report.

You can optionally specify the report output directory with the -report:output flag or the generated report format with -report:type. The JUnit report format is the default (and currently, only) output format.

Documenting Tests

Tests and documentation are naturally maintained together: when an endpoint is added or changed you must update your tests as well as the documentation that describes it. To generate documentation, simply add a description to a representative test case for your endpoint. You can pick and choose which tests generate documentation.

Instaunit supports a variety of properties you can include to document a request but all you need to get started is doc:

tests:
  -
    doc: |
      About this endpoint. Use _Markdown_ to add formatting!
    request:
      method: GET
      url: https://www.example.com/status
    response:
      status: 200
      entity: {"status": "Ok"}