What is Skybear.NET

Skybear.NET

• Is a managed platform simplifying automated HTTP API testing.
• Allows you to do comprehensive assertions on HTTP responses, including headers and body.
• Has full Hurl compatibility (latest major version).
• Makes multi-step API testing trivial by chaining tens or hundreds requests, along with their assertions, in the same script.
• Generates detailed reports from your tests execution, automatically persisting requests and response bodies for introspection in the future, and with automatic insights coming up soon.
• Provides managed infrastructure for authoring, storing, and most importantly executing your Hurl scripts, that automatically scales to handle as many script runs as you need.
• Supports multiple ways of triggering execution of your scripts, including periodic executions, and on-demand HTTP triggers enabling integration with your CICD pipelines.
• Eliminates excessive per-request/per-step/per-check charges, leading to substantial cost-savings for complex multi-step API tests covering complete user-journeys.

Who should use it

If you provide any kind of HTTP API for others to use, and you care about its correctness and performance, Skybear.NET is for you.

If you want to automate a bunch of API calls, using information from a response to a subsequent request, and want to write your scripts in a simple maintainable format, and run them on a managed batteries-included platform, Skybear.NET is for you.

If you want to integrate multiple HTTP APIs together, and configure them to run on a schedule or manually triggering them from your CI, Skybear.NET is for you.

The benefits

There are hundreds of tools targeting HTTP API testing. However, what we have found is that to get enough value from they, they require considerable amount of time and effort.

For example, to setup any of these tools:

• You need to configure your CI platform to run tests using latest versions of your tool of choice, gather the results/reports, and upload them somewhere for durable persistence.
• You need to provide a UI to view those uploaded reports, or at least have some other tool to download them locally.
• You need to write code or setup flimsy local environments to write your test scripts, and some of these tools are very fiddly or even flaky.
• You need to setup cron jobs or some manual scripting to run your tests every few seconds/minutes.

Unfortunately, to avoid all this hassle you end up not adding automated testing at all.

Your customers are the ones suffering in the end.

Skybear.NET removes all this toil, and provides all the above ready to use in a managed platform.

Hurl files

— From the Hurl creators

Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format.

It can chain requests, capture values and evaluate queries on headers and body response. Hurl is very versatile: it can be used for both fetching data and testing HTTP sessions.

Hurl makes it easy to work with HTML content, REST / SOAP / GraphQL APIs, or any other XML / JSON based APIs.

There are many popular tools among developers for API testing, like Hurl, Postman, Bruno.

Skybear.NET decided to support Hurl files initially, due to its simplicity, great readability, and enormous flexibility. More tools and syntaxes will be supported down the line, but for now Hurl is our first-citizen scripting syntax.

Take your existing Hurl scripts and run them on a managed platform where all the underlying infrastructure is managed for you. We aim for full compatibility with the latest Hurl major version(s), so you can always run your scripts locally and on Skybear.NET.

Each Hurl file can do tens or hundreds of requests allowing you to organize your testing scenarios or workflows as you wish, in as few or as many files as you like.

An example Hurl file testing a protected API:

test-protected-api.hurl

GET https://www.skybear.net/_live-demo/secure.json
HTTP 403

GET https://www.skybear.net/_live-demo/secure.json
Authentication: Bearer sample-token-123
HTTP 200
[Asserts]
# Raw body assertion.
body == "{\"ok\":true}"
# But also as JSON assertion.
jsonpath "$.ok" == true

• Run the above script in our Open Editor (no signup required)

Script and Script Runs

The main concept on the Skybear.NET platform is the Script project, which is a collection of Hurl source files. FYI, we often just use the term Script, omitting the word “project”.

An execution of a Script project is called a Script Run. The highlight of a Script Run is that it executes all the Hurl files of a Script, not only individual files.

Like in a movie, where the script describes the whole story across many scenes involving many actors, a Skybear.NET Script defines the whole sequence of requests and assertions to execute, potentially across many files.

Since each Hurl file has many requests/assertions, and a Script consists of potentially many Hurl files, it means that with a single Script Run you can do hundreds of requests. There is no excuse now to skip comprehensive test suites for your whole API. 💪🏼

Each Script Run generates comprehensive detailed reports to help you troubleshoot and debug your APIs in case they fail your assertions.

Script Triggers

A Script Trigger is the way that you can create a Script Run.

Skybear.NET supports several trigger types (see docs), and we continuously add more.

Some of our existing triggers are the Scheduled Cron Trigger allowing you to configure your Script to create a Script Run periodically, and the HTTP Hook Trigger that creates an HTTP endpoint allowing you to create a Script Run by sending a POST request to that endpoint.

Get started now

Follow our 1-minute quickstart guide and write your first test script.

If you have questions, email me directly (lambros [AT] skybear.net), or reach out on Bluesky or Twitter/X.