openapi-client-axios VS zod-to-openapi

Thanks for the feedback!

There is a full interactive sandbox example on the front/landing page https://openapistack.co

But point taken, will make sure code examples are visible on the overview page

There are also some tricks to make it easier, like using swagger/openapi to generate strongly typed API client (for Typescript) to your backend. There a package that generates the types: https://www.npmjs.com/package/openapi-client-axios

CoreAPI is deprecated, use OpenAPI instead. On the Javascript/Typescript side I personally like to use OpenAPI Client Axios to generate the client for me.

And typegen is openapi-client-axios-typegen. (You can also try swaxios, but I failed to run it.)

And if you like Zod, you might as well use this: https://github.com/asteasolutions/zod-to-openapi

It converts Zod types to OpenAPI specification.

Strong disagree.

The barrier you presume is that OpenAPI specs are hard to write. Raw oAPI in yaml is indeed a pain, but there are good DSL's out there.

I personally love Zod->OpenAPI, via https://ts-rest.com which uses https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anatine/zod-openapi. https://github.com/asteasolutions/zod-to-openapi is another alternative for Zod.

> The big bonus of the human documentation approaches today is that time is somewhat combined with building the client.

This is wild to me; human documentation is absurdly error-prone and it's almost always and immediately out of date. (Zod or other DSL) -> OpenAPI -> generated docs (and types! and clients! and mocks!) are always going to be better; always accurate, and faster. The upfront cost is slightly higher, but the ROI is _significant_.

OpenAPI specs lend themselves to excellent docs, ala Mintify or Docusaurus. Even interactive ones, like Swagger UI. The vast majority of API browsers & tooling understands OAPI, so why re-create (an often incomplete) version of the truth when using those tools?

> Whatever is overall fastest and gets me on to the problems I'm really trying to solve.

You may start (slightly) faster, but you'll incur significant cost when you move past the "trivial implementation" stage.

For instance: