Show HN: Step CI – open-source lightweight alternative to Pingdom and Checkly

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

63 points by Wissmueller 3 years ago | 14 comments

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.

tnolet 3 years ago |

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 3 years ago | |

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 3 years ago | | |

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.

mattatkeyboard 3 years ago |

I really like the captures features.

It lets you follow a semantic API path through multiple API calls.

https://github.com/stepci/stepci/blob/main/examples/captures...

spyremeown 3 years ago |

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 3 years ago | |

Thanks. Let us know how it goes! We'd be very glad if our tool would be helpful for your use-case

mousetree 3 years ago |

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

ushakov 3 years ago | |

We're so glad, you are!

1. Currently not and auth is a tricky subject

2. Not at the moment, but we have a proposal to allow custom scripts: https://github.com/stepci/stepci/discussions/47

Also, can I ask you what authentication system you use?

noka 3 years ago |

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 :)

boundlessdreamz 3 years ago |

This is awesome!

Also how did you embed the workflow editor/results in the homepage?

ushakov 3 years ago | |

Thanks!

My friend has mentioned in the post that the tool can be used as a library. The CLI and the Online Playground are just clients built on top of the library

Have a look at our docs: https://docs.stepci.com/guides/using-library.html

SeriousM 3 years ago |

Are there any plans to have a vscode extension for the intellisense?

ushakov 3 years ago | |

Great idea! We have it in the backlog