WireMock joins the OpenAPI initiative!

We are delighted to announce that WireMock has become a member of the OpenAPI Initiative! Joining this foundation, which serves as a driving force behind the OpenAPI specifications and developer tooling, aligns perfectly with our mission: to provide great experience for API development, mocking and testing, through WireMock Cloud and the WireMock open source project. We are looking forward to engaging with the large OpenAPI community, which includes industry-leading companies, developers, and experts. We will be taking part in further initiatives, working groups and events that will help shape the future of API development. 

“OpenAPI is the key standard around which a rich ecosystem of tools and infrastructure is rapidly evolving. We believe that first-class OpenAPI support in WireMock will unlock a huge amount of productivity for both API developers and consumers” - said Tom Akerhust, the WireMock creator and the CTO of WireMock Inc.

Thanks to the OpenAPI Initiative team and all stakeholders for the warm welcome! See the announcement on the organization's side here.

“We are thrilled to welcome WireMock as a member of the OpenAPI Initiative! Mocking APIs plays a crucial role in reducing development time and increasing productivity for developers. The open source community relies heavily on mocking tools in order to speed up development, better test for edge cases, and much more,” said Isabelle Mauny, OpenAPI Business Governing Board Chair. “It’s important for tools makers to implement the OpenAPI Specification and mocking APIs is one of the great benefits of using the OpenAPI Specification for your APIs.”

Our OpenAPI journey so far

WireMock Cloud and WireMock are no strangers to OpenAPI. There are already many cool OpenAPI features that our customers and our own developer team use every day.

First of all, we support the OpenAPI definition for WireMock’s administrative API. This API is used in all WireMock instances to configure the WireMock instance, extract test and observability data, and to export mock API definitions when running in Record or Playback mode. The WireMock OpenAPI specification is published right on our website, with help of the swagger-ui JavaScript component. Recently we moved the specification to a separate wiremock/spec repository to enable collaboration on a new version and alignment between multiple WireMock Implementations.

Just a few weeks ago, we also released the WireMock API Templates Library. This is a collection of 2,000+ open source ready-to-fly mock API definitions for popular web services and applications. This set was generated with help of WireMock Cloud's OpenAPI import feature (see below), and some tinkering and the APIs.guru database - “the machine-readable Wikipedia for Web APIs”. Hats off to Ivan Goncharov and Mike Ralphson for creating and maintaining this service!

WireMock Cloud takes support for Open API further and offers a range of powerful features to streamline API development and testing:

1. Import of OpenAPI definitions. This feature enables accurate and consistent mocking based on the defined endpoints, request/response schemas, and other specifications - Docs
2. Dynamic mock generation. WireMock Cloud can automatically generate mocks based on the API definition, eliminating the need to manually create mocks. Using the OpenAPI spec text and examples, WireMock Cloud intelligently generates accurate and consistent responses for each endpoint.
3. Interactive API documentation. WireMock Cloud displays API documentation that is automatically generated from the OpenAPI specification. This simplifies the process of understanding and exploring the API's capabilities.

“API-first development is at the core of both the WireMock open source project and WireMock Cloud, our developer productivity platform. Support for OpenAPI is central to our mission of enabling developers to simulate APIs across the entire application lifecycle”, said Oleg Nenashev, Community Builder and CNCF/CDF Ambassador, WireMock, “We believe that our vision and products are closely aligned with the OpenAPI Initiative. We’re pleased to join OAI as a member and work on expanding the OpenAPI ecosystem together”

If you want to try out WireMock Cloud, there is a free tier available! Learn more about the options and more features here.

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What’s next for us?

There are many new OpenAPI-related features on the WireMock public roadmap and backlog.

At the APIDays 2023 New York in May, we also announced the private beta of the WireMock Cloud Developer Portal – see the video and the live demo here! Among many other features, it provides seamless bidirectional synchronisation of the mock APIs and the linked OpenAPI specification. So, soon we will get to the stage where it is possible to co-design and mock APIs, basically removing boundaries between them and providing your teams with up-to-date mock APIs available for prototyping, testing and evaluation – instantly. Contact us if you’d like to try it out!

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We have high expectations for the upcoming OpenAPI 4 specification, and in particular its extended capabilities for request matching, examples and dynamic responses. These capabilities are going to extend the flexibility of the specification and, of course, provide us with a lot of opportunities for better mock API generation and validation. We’re looking forward to participating in this effort as a stakeholder and adopter.

Want to join our journey?

Yes, we are hiring! We’ve just raised a 6.5M USD seed investment round. With more than 100 paying enterprise customers, It allows us to invest in further evolution of WireMock and WireMock Cloud. In particular, we are looking for Java and Kotlin engineers in London and also a Product Manager and Sales Engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Reach out to us if you are interested!

As for the open source WireMock community, we are always looking for contributors and participants. All contributions to the OpenAPI integrations are welcome, and we have quite a few of the improvements on our roadmap! Read the participation guidelines on the project website and join the discussions on the WireMock Community Slack!

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