@stoplight/http-spec

What is it?

HTTP Spec is yet another, hopefully more pragmatic, attempt to standardise OpenAPI v2, OpenAPI v3, Postman Collections and other HTTP-related specification under a single AST to rule them all (at least in Stoplight).

There have been a lot of other attempts to have a universal specification such as API Elements, API Flow and they all failed for a number of reasons. Some of those have been discussed here.

Why build it?

Stoplight needs a way to interact with these documents in a standardized way, and relying on some dying intermediate format does not make that much sense. It's better to accept the sad state of the industry and work on a minimal superset format that can encompass the majority of the use cases.

How's HTTP Spec formed?

This repository contains exclusively converters functions that take OpenAPI v2, OpenAPI v3.x, or Postman Collection documents and transforms them into the http-spec interface.

You can explore the whole structure by looking at the IHttpService definition and checking out its descendands. You'll probably notice that it resembles a lot the current OpenAPI 3.x specification, and that's on purpose. OpenAPI 3.0 has first support and we gracefully upgrade/downgrade the other specification formats to it.

How do I write a converter?

If you would like to add support for another API description format, like RAML, follow these steps:

1. Create a new directory in the src/ directory
2. Create a function that from your input returns an IHttpService
3. Let the TypeScript errors guide you while filling out the missing fields (such as Security Schemes, Servers)
4. Create a function that's able to return an array of IHttpOperation from your own input
5. Profit

IHttpOperation merger

src/merge.ts contains a utility that reduces the list of IHttpOperation's into a minimal set. This tool particularly handy if you have a recorded list of request/response pairs, and you want to infer a specification out of it.

The strategy is the following:

1. group operations by paths
2. for each group:
   1. merge request definitions, headers, query parameters, body schemas
   2. group responses by the code
   3. for each response code:
      1. merge headers, examples, encodings, ...
      2. group contents by media type
      3. for each media type: merge body schemas

Merging strategy highlights

• Conflicting examples will make the merger relax the constraints. That means e.g. if a header is required in one request and not required in another one then the resulting operation will not require that header to be present.
• Different JSON Schemas are coupled with anyOf.
• By default, additionalProperties are permitted.