swagger-cli VS openapi

If you are in a situation where you have a backend and you want to expose an API and then you would eventually want a client, you would need format specs as the starting point where server and clients are generated from that one source.

At the moment, OpenAPI with YAML is the only way to go but you can't easily split the spec into separate files as you would do any program with packages, modules and what not.

There are third party tools[0] which are archived and the libraries they depend upon are up for adoption.

In that space, either you can use something like cue language 1] or something like TypeSpec which is purpose built for this so yet, this seems like a great tool although I have not tried it yet myself.

[0]. https://github.com/APIDevTools/swagger-cli

[1]. https://cuelang.org/

EDIT: formating

In order to use Redocusaurus, I needed a single spec file. Both Swagger cli and OpenApi cli offered an option to merge separate specs into one. The problem was that one of them required a "root spec file" to drive the merging and the other required extra information to resolve conflicts. My specs had neither.

I wonder if there is a format for API -> client automation that can be good enough, in the end Stripe have a rest API, with enough description it should be possible.

Okay so after a quick google it appears Microsoft are the "Simpsons already done it" of the programming world: https://github.com/Azure/autorest/

It'd probably be a good idea to add an Elixir backend for that and point it at Stripe's API here: https://github.com/stripe/openapi

Our specs were split between several YAML spec files. It looked like a good idea when we did that - large files are not fun to work with. The problem is that very little in the OpenAPI ecosystem was built for multiple files. I strongly recommend that you will save yourself the pain and go the mono-file route. If Stripe can have a 4.5MB spec file, so can we.