Frisby is a REST API testing framework built on node.js and Jasmine that makes testing API endpoints easy, fast, and fun. Read below for a quick overview, or check out the API documentation.

Install Frisby

Frisby requires both node.js and NPM to be installed on your system, and is installable as an NPM package.

npm install -g frisby

Write Tests

Frisby tests start with frisby.create with a description of the test followed by one of get, post, put, delete, or head, and ending with toss to generate the resulting jasmine spec test. Frisby has many built-in test helpers like expectStatus to easily test HTTP status codes, expectJSON to test expected JSON keys/values, and expectJSONTypes to test JSON value types, among many others.

var frisby = require('frisby');

frisby.create('Get Brightbit Twitter feed')
  .get('https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=brightbit')
  .expectStatus(200)
  .expectHeaderContains('content-type', 'application/json')
  .expectJSON('0', {
    place: function(val) { expect(val).toMatchOrBeNull("Oklahoma City, OK"); }, // Custom matcher callback
    user: {
      verified: false,
      location: "Oklahoma City, OK",
      url: "http://brightb.it"
    }
  })
  .expectJSONTypes('0', {
    id_str: String,
    retweeted: Boolean,
    in_reply_to_screen_name: function(val) { expect(val).toBeTypeOrNull(String); }, // Custom matcher callback
    user: {
      verified: Boolean,
      location: String,
      url: String
    }
  })
.toss();

Any of the Jasmine matchers can be used inside anonymous functions instead of key values, and inside the after and afterJSON callbacks to perform additional or custom tests on the response data.

Full API Documentation ►

Run Tests

Frisby is built on top of the Jasmine BDD framework, and uses the jasmine-node test runner to run spec tests.

Install jasmine-node

npm install -g jasmine-node

File naming conventions

Files must end with spec.js to run with jasmine-node.

Suggested file naming is to append the filename with _spec, like mytests_spec.js and moretests_spec.js

Run it from the CLI

cd your/project
jasmine-node spec/api/

Continuous Integration

The jasmine-node test runner has an option that generates test run reports in JUnit XML format. This format is compaitlble with most CI servers, including Hudson, Jenkins, Bamboo, Pulse, and others.

All you need to do is run the tests with the --junitreport flag in your CI server:

jasmine-node spec/api/ --junitreport
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