Welcome to the API challenges.
This is a learning environment to
experiment, explore and play with API testing.
And in this video, I'm going to give you a
quick overview of the features and how to use the API challenges.
So what we have with the API challenges,
and this is the cloud install on apichallenges.herokuapp.
com.
So we have a general set of introductory information.
We can explore the data that is in the
application which will be created and amended through the API.
We have a list of challenges that you can work through and we have API
documentation, the kind of stuff you see with any API - explains all the endpoints,
explains the type of data that you can put in the verbs that are available.
And what we have that is unique to the API challenges is a list of challenges that
you can work through and it will track your progress.
So this is a kind of gamified introduction.
So if you don't know how to test APIs,
look at the challenges, figure out what the challenge is asking
you, go away and do some research, come back, apply it in here.
So you will learn how to test APIs by doing this.
You can view the challenges as a set of
coverage to try and achieve with automated execution.
We will eventually create videos and
tutorials around all the challenges so that you can learn how to use them.
But by tracking your done status, we're
gamifying the testing process and learning process.
So there's more encouragement to come back.
This is a set of achievements that you can work through to learn how to test APIs.
Now, this is a multi-user application,
which means other people are using it at the same time.
So don't use any secret data.
Don't use this to store any personal Todo items and be considerate of other users.
Try to make this a family friendly system
and we want this tool to be easily available to as many people as possible.
So we're trying to make this open.
And if people start abusing the data that they put in there, we'll have to lock this
behind registration processes, sign up processes, make it hard to get started.
And really, we want this to be as easy as possible to learn API testing.
But also remember, you can download this
application, use it locally, then it won't be in multi-user mode.
You won't have anyone else interfering with your testing.
And also because this is a multi-user
application, the data in here will reset every 10 minutes.
Now, the API is accessible through the normal API calls, so you can use any API
system to come in here and get the information.
I can issue a request to get the To dos that information that's in there.
I tend to use Insomnia or PAW or Postman but any API front end should work and we
make the API calls to create, read, amend and delete the data that's in the system
and some of the challenges require authentication.
But the API documentation should give you
enough information to see what the endpoints are and start exploring them.
One of the skills we have to develop with
API testing is learning how to read the API documentation.
And if these calls I make are successful, then we'll see the data being added,
changed and amended through the entities exploring the GUI.
But we can also check all of that by
issuing get requests on the API to pull the data back.
The challenges list is a list of things to try with the API.
And if you've downloaded the application and running it locally, then your progress
will be automatically tracked against these.
If you're using the cloud hosted version, then you'll have to register a challenge
or session and we'll have other videos that show how to do that
so that your challenge completion can be recorded against your session, so that you
can retrieve your session because we'll store on the cloud for a little while -
just to help you get used to testing these applications.
So that was just a quick overview of the API challenges application.
And you can find more information about this at eviltester.
com/api
challenges, and there'll be links to
download the jar file instructions on how to run it.
And there will be more information and examples on how to use the challenges.
Extra videos. So explore the site, read the
documentation, start testing this online, download the application.
But the main thing is to experiment with
the API and practise your API testing to improve your skill sets.