Sketching APIs with the Apiary Editor

API Blueprint

A handy tool for generating API sketches is called the Apiary’s API Blueprint Editor (https://apiary.io). It’s easy to use and supports creating a live online version of sketches so that we can share them with others. We can even use tools like curl or coded API client applications to interact with our sketches. This ability to interact with our sketches makes it really easy to quickly test and experiment with our API implementation ideas before committing to writing lots of code.

Let’s walk through a sketching session using the Apiary’s API Blueprint Editor to see how it can help us sketch our API ideas. We’ll go over the following:

• Loading the Apiary Editor and logging in.
• Creating a new Apiary project.
• Adding our first API sketch.
• Testing our first sketch with Apiary’s Mock Server.
• Saving our sketch to our local disk as another asset in our project.

By the time we’re done, we should have a pretty good idea of how we can use Apiary’s API Blueprint Editor to create and save our own API sketches in the future.

About Apiary: Apiary was founded in 2013 by Czech entrepreneur Jakub Nesetril. Originally focused on quickly documenting and testing HTTP APIs, Apiary allows users to utilize Markdown in order to specify HTTP requests and responses. Over time, Apiary has created a series of API-related tools for designing, documenting, mocking, and testing APIs. Apiary was sold to Oracle in 2017, and continues to offer free online versions of all of Apiary’s API tools.

Loading Apiary Editor and logging in

The first step in creating API sketches with the Apiary Editor is loading the web application and logging in. While the use of the application is free, we’ll need to create an account on Apiary’s website in order to continue to build and save our sketches.

First, to load the application, we need to open the browser and navigate to https://app.apiary.io. When we do that, we should see the sign in screen that looks like this: