Package: zum
ZumStop writing scripts to interact with your APIs. Call them as CLIs instead.Zum(German word roughly meaning "to the" or "to" depending on the context, pronounced/tsʊm/) is a tool that lets you describe a web API using aTOMLfile and then interact with that API using your command line. This means thatthe days of writing custom scripts to help you interact and develop each of your APIs are over. Just create azum.toml, describe your API and forget about maintaining more code!Why Zum?While there are tools out there with goals similar tozum, the scopes are quite different. The common contenders areOpenAPI-based tools (likeSwaggerUI) andcURL. To me, using an OpenAPI-based documentation tool is essential on any large enough API, but the description method isveryverbose and quite complex, so often times it is added once the API has quite a few endpoints. On the other hand, cURL gets very verbose and tedious very fast when querying APIs, so I don't like to use it when developing my APIs. As a comparison, here's acurlcommand to query a local endpoint with a JSON body:curl--header"Content-Type: application/json"\--requestPOST\--data'{"name": "Dani", "city": "Santiago"}'\http://localhost:8000/living-beingsAnd here is thezumcommand to achieve the same result:zumcreateapplication/jsonDaniSantiagoNow, imagine having to run this command hundreads of times during API development changing only the values on the request body, for example. You can see how using cURL isnot ideal.Thecomplete documentationis available on theofficial website.InstallationInstall using pip!pipinstallzumUsageBasic UsageThe basic principle is simple:Describe your API using azum.tomlfile.Use thezumCLI to interact with your API.We get morein-depthwith how to structure thezum.tomlfile and how to use thezumCLI onthe complete documentation, but for now let's see a very basic example. Imagine that you are developing an API that gets the URL ofa song on YouTube. This API, for now, has only 1 endpoint:GET /song(clearly aWIP). To describe your API, you would have to write azum.tomlfile similar to this one:[metadata]server="http://localhost:8000"[endpoints.dada]route="/song"method="get"Now, to get your song's URL, all you need to do is to run:zumdadaNotice that, after thezumcommand, we passed an argument, that in this case wasdada. This argument tellszumthat it should interact with the endpoint described on thedadaendpoint section, denoted by the header[endpoints.dada]. As a rule, to access an endpoint described by the header[endpoints.{my-endpoint-name}], you will call thezumcommand with the{my-endpoint-name}argument:zum{my-endpoint-name}params,headersandbodyBeware!There are some nuances on these attribute definitions, so readingthe complete documentationishighly recommended.Theparamsof an endpointOn the previous example, theroutewas static, which means thatzumwillalwaysquery the same route. For some things, this might not be the best of ideas (for example, for querying entities on REST APIs), and you might want to interpolate a value on theroutestring. Let's say that there's a collection of songs, and you wanted to get the song withid57. Your endpoint definition should look like the following:[endpoints.get-song]route="/songs/{id}"method="get"params=["id"]As you can see, the element insideparamsmatches the element inside the brackets on theroute. This means that whatever parameter you pass to thezumCLI, it will be replaced on therouteon-demand:zumget-song57Now,zumwill send aGETHTTP request tohttp://localhost:8000/songs/57. Pretty cool!Theheadersof an endpointTheheadersare definedexactlythe same as theparams. Let's see a small example to illustrate how to use them. Imagine that you have an API that requiresJWTauthorization toGETthe songs of its catalog. Let's define that endpoint:[endpoints.get-authorized-catalog]route="/catalog"method="get"headers=["Authorization"]Now, to acquire the catalog, we would need to run:zumget-authorized-catalog"Bearer super-secret-token"⚠Warning: Notice that, for the first time, we surrounded something with quotes on the CLI. The reason we did this is that, without the quotes, the console has no way of knowing if you want to pass a parameter with a space in the middle or if you want to pass multiple parameters, so it defaults to receiving the words as multiple parameters. To stop this from happening, you can surround the string in quotes, and now the whole string will be interpreted as only one parameter with the space in the middle of the string. This will be handy on future examples, sokeep it in mind.This will send aGETrequest tohttp://localhost:8000/catalogwith the following headers:{"Authorization":"Bearer super-secret-token"}And now you have your authorization-protected music catalog!Thebodyof an endpointJust likeparamsandheaders, thebody(the body of the request) gets defined as an array:[endpoints.create-living-being]route="/living-beings"method="post"body=["name","city"]To run this endpoint, you just need to run:zumcreate-living-beingDaniSantiagoThis will send aPOSTrequest tohttp://localhost:8000/living-beingswith the following request body:{"name":"Dani","city":"Santiago"}Notice that you can also cast the parameters to different types. You can read more about this on the complete documentation's section aboutthe request body.Combiningparams,headersandbodyOf course, sometimes you need to use someparams, someheadersandabody. For example, if you wanted to create a song inside an authorization-protected album (anested entity), you would need to use the album's id as aparam, the "Authorization" key inside theheadersto get the authorization and the new song's data as thebody. For this example, the song has aname(which is a string) and adurationin seconds (which is an integer). Let's describe this situation![endpoints.create-song]route="/albums/{id}/songs"method="post"params=["id"]headers=["Authorization"]body=["name",{name="duration",type="integer"}]Now, you can call the endpoint using:zumcreate-song8"Bearer super-secret-token""Con Altura"161This will callPOST /albums/8/songswith the following headers:{"Authorization":"Bearer super-secret-token"}And the following request body:{"name":"Con Altura","duration":161}As you can probably tell,zumreceives theparamsfirst on the CLI, then theheadersand then thebody. Inpythonicterms, whatzumdoes is that it kind ofunpacksthe three arrays consecutively, something like the following:arguments=[*params,*headers,*body]zum(arguments)DevelopingClone the repository:gitclonehttps://github.com/daleal/zum.gitcdzumRecreate environment:makeget-poetry
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