orval VS openapi-generator

In cases where the client needs to stay separate, we have had a good experience with Orval[1] to generate a fully-typed @tanstack/query client from our OpenAPI spec.

[1] https://orval.dev/

- Vite/React/Tailwind for the frontend, with [Orval](https://orval.dev/) to generate FE definitions based on the API spec.

For non-API/SPA use-cases, it also has good HTML support, with built-in Jinja and HTMX integrations. The docs are great (https://docs.litestar.dev/latest/ - not quite Django-tier but that's the gold standard), however the reference application is a tad too complex imo (https://github.com/litestar-org/litestar-fullstack).

https://github.com/litestar-org/awesome-litestar has a list of useful extensions - highly recommend trying it out if you are starting a new Python web project.

In order to generate the API client, there are a few options available, but we are going to use (Orval)[https://orval.dev]. Orval is a CLI tool that generates API clients based on an OpenAPI specification. It supports TypeScript, JavaScript, Axios, React, Vue, Angular and Svelte and it's highly customizable.

I would use "reveal": "never" if I don't care about the results of the command, for example, I generate swagger types using orval.dev on every folder open, but I want this to run in background as it's not that important, so I use "reveal": "never" for it.

we started using (and now contributing to) https://orval.dev/ this year which both generates the mocks using MSW as well as the client-side networking code (React Query in our case). It removes so much boilerplate its amazing.

wrote up the basics of our workflow few weeks ago https://betaacid.co/blog/api-contracts

Personally, find gRPC-Web very attractive but the current state of TypeScript/JS code-gen is very confusing and lacking.

I would love something like https://orval.dev for gRPC-web. Have I missed something or is it just early to expect it?

I tried a few libraries but couldn't get them to work or would generate unappealing results. I believe I'm hitting this issue with my local experiments. https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web/issues/535

This is a Library I've used in the past, https://github.com/anymaniax/orval

If you have OpenAPI specs to work with you could also use Orval (https://orval.dev/) to generate a lot of code. We’re just starting to evaluate it at work but so far the team that’s trialing it is liking it.

On the frontend we can use the OpenAPI docs to generate the TS types for our data structures. Not only types but fetch functions as well as react-query hook can be generated as well. And in this blog post you can see how to do that with a library called Orval.

On this page, we’ll use a code generator called Orval.

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.