API testing with karate

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What is karate ?

Karate is a open source API test automation framework, it's an extension of cucumber framework which follows BDD. Since the cucumber syntax are very human readable even non programmers can understand/write tests easily.  You define your test scenario in a Gherkin file which also know as a feature file. Karate has many more features that we can use to ease our API testing, this post will give you enough details to start implementing your own testing project.


Although we write unit tests to cover up the functionality of the code, having this type of integration tests puts you more confident to release a feature, patch to QA or even a pre-QA urgent release to production. Because having actual tests can make sure your code fix did not break anything.

What you will learn 

  • Write a simple feature file with test scenario and execute test
  • JUnit 5 integration 
  • Some example with karate 
  • Reporting

Getting Started 

We can use standard maven project to write our tests. Here in this post I'm using a spring-boot project because to run the example I have implemented a simple rest service. You need to add below two dependencies. 
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.intuit.karate</groupId>
    <artifactId>karate-apache</artifactId>
    <version>0.9.5</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.intuit.karate</groupId>
    <artifactId>karate-junit5</artifactId>
    <version>0.9.5</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

We also need latest maven-surefire-plugin to support junit and reports 

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.22.2</version>
</plugin>

Follow Up

If you wish to follow up with this blog post using the sample project, please follow the below steps.

Technologies used 
  • Java 8
  • Apache Maven 3.6.3
  • JUnit 5
  • Karate 
  • Spring-boot
2) Open the project using your IDE. (I'm using Intellij idea)
3) Run the Spring-boot application. (Run the KarateApplication class)

The sample spring-boot application is exposing a mock REST service which we can use to do API testing with karate. While checking out karate documentation I found this Repo as a recommended example which uses JUnit 4. I also used this repo as a reference. 

Folder Structure

Since karate scripts are non java files and usually these files should go to /src/test/resources directory, but karate recommends to keep these feature files alone side with java files. To allow that add below to build section in your pom file. Basically your tests should comes under  /src/test/java directory
<build>
    <testResources>
        <testResource>
            <directory>src/test/java</directory>
            <excludes>
                <exclude>**/*.java</exclude>
            </excludes>
        </testResource>
    </testResources> 
</build>

Karate Configuration File

In startup karate expects a java-script file called karate-config.js. In this file we can define configuration as a JSON object. All the keys and values in the JSON object will be made available as test scrip variables. For example we can save the baseUrl of the REST API. Create a file karete-config.js and place it src/test/java directory
function fn() {
    let config = {
        baseUrl : 'http://localhost:8080/v1/api'
    };
    return config;
}

First Test

We have the following mock API that create a employee include in our project.
Url: http://localhost:8080/api/v1/employee
Method: POST
Request Body:
{
   "id": [string],
   "name": [string]
}
Let's create a feature file create-employee.feature in /src/test/java/your-package/ directory.
The feature file is in plain English which is easy to understand what is happening, even non programmers can read and understand to some extend.Here the baseUrl is picked from karate-config.js file and json response is matched with the status code.
With IDE support in the development phase you can run these individual test by right click and run the feature file. We'll see later how to run all tests at once from the command line with junit.

With JUNIT 5

Above example has only one scenario, let's test another feature in this API. Create file get-employee.feature in the same directory with below content.
Now we have few tests, we can run these tests at once by creating a java class and defining the tests in the class. Create EmployeeTest class in the same directory.
Now run mvn test in your terminal to run all the tests at once.

Match multiple responses data tables. 

You send and match multiple requests response by simply using a data table. In the same create-employee feature file add the below scenario to use data table, here name from the request is mapped with name in the response.

Match response from json file 

If you are getting a large payload as response, easiest way is to match response from a file. karate have a read function for this. You can read many files types in karate including json.  Below example shows how to match a list of response returning back from your response. You can add the json file in the same directory alone side with your feature files. 
Karate also support dynamic data testing, I will post about how to test with dynamic data in a future blog post. 

Reporting
Since we added the maven-surfire-plugin, after the execution of each feature with JUnit a individual HTML report is generated in the /target/surfire-reports directory.

Cucumber Reporting

The default reports contains individual feature reporst, to get an overview report you can use cucumber reporting . Karate suggesting us to use cucumber-reporting library programmatically in combination with the Karate parallel runner. Use the below maven dependency.
 <dependency>
       <groupId>net.masterthought</groupId>
       <artifactId>cucumber-reporting</artifactId>
       <version>3.8.0</version>
       <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
We need to use karate parallel runner to run all the tests in parallel. We need to create CucumberReportParallelRunner class in the classpath. (/src/test/java)
To run and generate the report you can use the below maven command.
mvn -Dtest=CucumberReportParallelRunner test
You can find the generated report in target/cucumber-html-reports directory. Below is a cucumber report generate from this project.
cucumber-report
cucumber-report

Conclusion 

I hope you got basic the understanding karate and how to use it for your API testing. I will post more on karate features.  Feel free to share your thoughts on this testing framework.
Happy Coding. 

References & Useful Readings.

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Thank you very much for reading my post !!!

      Delete
  2. Good start , can you also for soap webservice automation using karate

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Samfeep, we can use karate to test soap webservices, see the example from karate,
      https://github.com/intuit/karate/blob/master/karate-demo/src/test/java/demo/soap/soap.feature

      Delete
  3. Hi,
    How we add the mock server ???

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Punit, sorry for the late reply, The mock server is already their in the project, you just need to run the spring boot application

      https://github.com/Rajithkonara/API-test-karate-example

      Delete
  4. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
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