HN Explorer

Show HN: Step CI – open-source lightweight alternative to Pingdom and Checkly (github.com)

63 points by Wissmueller ↗ HN
In our last post, we showed that there is an easy way to generate automated tests for Rest APIs from your specification.

Since the last release, we have added some new features:

  - Generate tests from your API spec in the CLI
  - Run tests against gRPC APIs automatically
  - Get request and response information when your tests fail
  - Generate fake data and use it in the requests
  - Bring your own test data (from .csv)
  - More intuitive CLI interface
We built this because we wanted a simple, developer-friendly way to automate API testing without relying on cloud solutions. You can integrate it with Docker, GitHub Actions and Node. Your tests can have multiple steps, with shared context between them. Lastly, you can use it as a library and in combination with other testing tools like Jest, Ava, Mocha (and soon Insomnia).

If you want to step out of locked-in cloud solutions, give our tool a try.

15 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 46.5 ms ] thread
spyremeown
This looks pretty nice! I had to do a bunch of mocking and magic to mock servers and clients for testing gRPC endpoints, and I think something like this would make it a lot simpler.
ushakov
Thanks. Let us know how it goes! We'd be very glad if our tool would be helpful for your use-case
SeriousM
Are there any plans to have a vscode extension for the intellisense?
ushakov
Great idea! We have it in the backlog
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
noka
This looks really interesting! As a senior software engineer it looks much cleaner and simple than what I worked with, PMed you on LinkedIn with some questions :)
tnolet
Just wanted to hop in here as founder of Checkly that I think this is awesome. Coded API checks, or checks living in your codebase make total sense. I'm also kinda humbled as I launched Checkly as an indie hacker couple years back and later went VC route. Being mentioned by name by an alternative is kinda really cool! Good luck StepCI team and let's make the web (and the APIs) more reliable!
ushakov
Nice to meet you Tim. Checkly is an awesome tool and thank you for your comment!

API monitoring is a very crowded space. Our approach is similar to HashiCorp with tools like Terraform, both philosophically (being open-source) and UX-wise (configuration as code).

Our users can benefit from being able to self-host it and customise it according to their own needs

tnolet
Hey! Yes, very crowded! But also ripe for change as me and you are doing. Very excited to see how people will use Step CI, Checkly and whoever else wants to join this mission.
etewiah
Kudos to you for your approach to competition!!
mousetree
Congrats on the launch. I'm excited to try this out.

Some questions:

1. Is it possible to include headers at the workflow-level. I can't determine whether this is possible from reading the docs. Use case: include Authorization header for all tests/steps

2. Is it possible to run some command or query before a workflow/test/step. Use case: obtaining auth tokens