Show HN: Chapar – A Native API Testing Tool for Developers

Show HN: Chapar – A Native API Testing Tool for Developers(github.com)

4 points by mohsenmkh88 1 year ago | 5 comments

Hi HN,

I'm excited to share Chapar, a native API testing tool I've been building with GoLang. I created it out of frustration with other API testing tools and aimed to make something fast, minimalistic, and more flexible, especially when it comes to gRPC.

Features:

Supports both HTTP and gRPC protocols. Workspaces to organize your API endpoints.

Environments for storing variables and configurations for different API setups.

Send requests using GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, HEAD, OPTIONS, CONNECT methods.

Flexible request body types like Form, Raw, Binary, and content types such as JSON, XML, Text, HTML.

Different authentication methods like Basic, Bearer, API Key, or No Auth.

Support for gRPC reflection, proto files, and loading sample request structures.

Chaining requests with Pre/Post request options for more complex testing workflows.

Dark mode.

All data is stored locally, ensuring privacy—nothing gets sent to any server.

Import Postman collections.

Cross-platform and lightweight, without any JS, ensuring it's fast and easy to run.

Upcoming Features:

Support for WebSocket and GraphQL.

Python as a scripting language for pre/post requests.

Tunneling to servers and Kubernetes clusters as pre-request actions.

You can try it out by downloading the binary from the [GitHub release page](https://github.com/chapar-rest/chapar/releases) or building it yourself. Since it's written in GoLang and has no JavaScript dependencies, it's lightweight and fast to start and use.

I'm still in the early stages and there's a lot of room to grow, so I'd love feedback and suggestions. Feel free to give it a try and let me know your thoughts!

leononame 1 year ago |

Congratulations! The local API client space urgently needs some Open Source tools that don't suck. I've ditched Postman and Insomnia for Bruno, but since this supports gRPC I really want to give it a try.

Python as a scripting language sounds nice, I don't particularly enjoy working with JS and I think it'd be a nice addition for people like me who prefer something else. Not having to install an electron app is also huge for me.

For me, installation failed with "Package xkbcommon-x11 was not found in the pkg-config search path.". I needed to install libxkbcommon-x11-devel on fedora.

It definitely is super snappy and lightweight.

Is there an option to use a dedicated directory for a workspace to share it in git? That'd be huge for me, being able to commit the request yaml files to git is super nice

mohsenmkh88 1 year ago | |

Hi Thanks for your feedback, all the configs are stored as file and ofc you can share it in any ware works for you.

On linux you can find the files on ~/home/.config/chapar

And each workspace is a directory there.

leononame 1 year ago | | |

What I mean is that it'd be nice if you could store them somewhere else explicitly. Create a new workspace and store its contents in your code repository so that you can commit it and share it with your team directly through git.

erkanp 1 year ago |

Congratulations on launching your product, great job!