apiclarity VS openapi-generator

We'll install APIClarity into a Kubernetes cluster to test our API documentation. We're using a Kind cluster for demonstration purposes. Of course, if you have another Kubernetes cluster up and running elsewhere, all steps also work there.

If you go to APIClarity, the first thing you’ll see is the source code (Figure 1), followed by some documentation at the bottom.

This feature is available in the open-source tool APIClarity, as part of the OpenClarity initiative.

Hi, I would also like to add another tool I'm contributing to at work (cisco) called APIClarity [1]. It aims at reconstructing swagger specifications of REST microservices running in K8S, but can also be run locally.

This is a challenging task and we don't support OpenAPI v3 specs yet (we are working on it).

Feel free to have a look, and get ideas from it :)

We'll also be presenting it at next Kubecon 2022.

[1]: https://github.com/openclarity/apiclarity

For example, APIClarity is a tool that observes all of the API traffic within your Kubernetes environment. Based on traffic observation, APIClarity infers an OpenAPI description for those APIs. This is especially helpful if the API creator never defined or provided such a description. It also surfaces potential problems with existing APIs, such as requests made to undocumented, shadow APIs or continued use of deprecated, zombie APIs. If you’re getting started on the path toward OAS compliance, then tools like APIClarity can be a great source of insight and observability.

The fundamental first step to solving this problem is to create an API spec and use it to audit and document the APIs your apps use. Ideally, we would create an API spec simply by observing API traffic in real-world applications. In the past, there was no simple, scalable, and open-source tooling capable of doing this. Now, we have APIClarity—an open-source API traffic visibility tool for Kubernetes (K8s) clusters. It’s purpose-built to address the gap and enable API reconstruction through observation.

Disclaimer: We're an early adopter of Stainless at Mux.

I've spent more of my time than I'd like to admit managing both OpenAPi spec files [1] and fighting with openapi-generator [2] than any sane person should have to. While it's great having the freedom to change the templates an thus generated SDKs you get with using that sort of approach, it's also super time consuming, and when you have a lot of SDKs (we have 6 generated SDKs), in my experience it needs someone devoted to managing the process, staying up with template changes etc.

Excited to see more SDK languages come to Stainless!

[1] https://www.mux.com/blog/an-adventure-in-openapi-v3-api-code...

[2] https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator

As a result, the following specification can be used to generate clients in a number of different languages via OpenAPI Generator.

Of course you can compile the server from source if you have Go and the OpenAPI generator JAR (https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator?tab=readme...)

Follow these steps : https://github.com/c100k/rebootx-on-prem/blob/master/.github...

And then :

(cd ./impl/http-server-go && GOARCH=amd64 GOOS=openbsd go build -o /app/rebootx-on-prem-http-server-go-openbsd-amd64 -v)

By adapting the arch if needed. Not tested, but it should work.

TL;DR: Start generating your HTTP clients and all the DTOs of the requests and responses automatically from your API, using openapi-generator instead of writing your own.

As an alternative, you can also use the official OpenAPI Generator, which is a more generic tool supporting a wide range of languages and frameworks.

I trialed generating SDKs using the OpenAPI Generator package, which was largely unsatisfactory.

If Swagger/OpenAPI is available, save yourself a lot of trouble and generate the client using OpenAPI Generator. If not, use a library like RestEase to make it significantly easier to create the client.

For a run of the mill REST API you should generate OpenAPI (Swagger) info for the API using a library like NSwag or Swashbuckle. You'd want to do this no matter what because it's documentation for the API, but the bonus is that you can use it with tools like OpenAPI Generator to create API client code and models in a variety of languages. You certainly can create an API client library manually, it would entail having a nuget package with a class library that contains the models and client code for calling the endpoints (which I'd create using a lib such as RestEase unless you just enjoy writing boilerplate code by hand). However 95% of the time it simply isn't worth creating your own lib when OpenAPI is available because once you've done it a time or two it takes less than 5 min to run the generator and create (or update) a lib.

Then you can use oapi-codegen or openapi-generator to generate the Go (or other language) SDK for it.