A quick and easy way to visually test your Rails application's API.

• Removed restriction around ActionDispatch::Routing::Mapper::Constraints to allow Devise routes to appear.
• Removed dependency on latest jquery version and force 1.8 because of references to $.live()
• Simplified user interface to focus only on json testing.

There are already many awesome API clients (such as Postman), so why reinvent the wheel?

API Taster compared to alternatives, have the following advantages:

• API endpoints are automatically generated from your Rails routes definition
• Defining params is as easy as defining routes
• Params can be shared with your test factories

Add API Taster in your gemfile:

gem 'api_taster'

Mount API Taster, this will allow you to visit API Taster from within your app. For example:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  mount ApiTaster::Engine => "/api_taster" if Rails.env.development?
end

In routes.rb, define parameters for each API endpoint after the normal routes definition block. For example:

if Rails.env.development?
  ApiTaster.routes do
    desc 'Get a __list__ of users'
    get '/users'

    post '/users', {
      :user => {
        :name => 'Fred'
      }
    }

    get '/users/:id', {
      :id => 1
    }

    put '/users/:id', {
      :id => 1, :user => {
        :name => 'Awesome'
      }
    }

    delete '/users/:id', {
      :id => 1
    }
  end
end

If you use a test factory such as FactoryGirl, you can require your test factories and share the params. For example in FactoryGirl you can use the attributes_for(:name_of_factory) method.

If there are certain params (such as API version and auth token) that need to be present in every API endpoint, you may set them in ApiTaster.global_params before ApiTaster.routes:

ApiTaster.global_params = {
  :version    => 1,
  :auth_token => 'teGpfbVitpnUwm7qStf9'
}

ApiTaster.routes do
  # your route definitions
end

Before each route definitions, you may use desc to add some comments. Markdown is supported.

desc 'Get a __list__ of users'
get '/users'

For each route definition, you may supply an optional third parameter (hash) as metadata:

get '/users', {}, { :meta => 'data' }

The metadata option is useful for passing in arbitrary data for a route definition. For example, you could specify response expectations so that your test suite could tap into them.

Metadata for every route definition are stored in ApiTaster::Route.metadata. Please read the source code to find out how to get metadata for a particular route.

Instead of manually finding out which route definitions you need, API Taster provides a warning page that shows you all the missing definitions.

APIs evolve - especially during the development stage. To keep ApiTaster.routes in sync with your route definitions, API Taster provides a warning page that shows you the definitions that are obsolete/mismatched therefore you could correct or remove them.

Added Drop Down to select REST call to be submiited as JSON or HTML.

Added Drop down as a parameter to be displayed in the Form.

E.g.

desc 'Get a __list__ of users based on type.'
get '/users',
{
  :type => ['admin','supervisors']
}

This will show a dropdown in the form with the array elements as select values.

This gem is released under the MIT License.

Fred Wu, originally built for Locomote.