Introduction

Zum (German word roughly meaning "to the" or "to" depending on the context, pronounced /tsʊm/) is a tool that lets you describe a web API using a TOML (opens new window) file and then interact with that API using your command line. This means that the days of writing custom scripts to help you interact and develop each of your APIs are over. Just create a zum.toml, describe your API and forget about maintaining more code!

Why Zum?

While there are tools out there with goals similar to zum, the scopes are quite different. The common contenders are OpenAPI (opens new window)-based tools (like SwaggerUI (opens new window)) and cURL (opens new window). To me, using an OpenAPI-based documentation tool is essential on any large enough API, but the description method is very verbose and quite complex, so often times it is added once the API has quite a few endpoints. On the other hand, cURL gets very verbose and tedious very fast when querying APIs, so I don't like to use it when developing my APIs. As a comparison, here's a curl command to query a local endpoint with a JSON body:

curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --request POST \
    --data '{"name": "Dani", "city": "Santiago"}' \
    http://localhost:8000/living-beings

And here is the zum command to achieve the same result:

zum create application/json Dani Santiago

Now, imagine having to run this command hundreads of times during API development changing only the values on the request body, for example. You can see how using cURL is not ideal.

Installation

Install using pip!

pip install zum