Restler

Restler is a command-line collection runner for applications like DevHttpClient and Postman. It allows you to effortlessly run a DevHttpClient repository directly from the command-line. It is built with extensibility in mind so that you can easily create AddIns to fit your needs.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• AddIns
• Running a Rest Request Collection
• Options
• Available AddIns
• To Do

Installation

Restler is built on .NET platform using C#. To run Restler, make sure that you have .NET framework version 4.0 or higher installed on your computer.

Install from chocolatey

The easiest way to install Restler is through chocolatey. You can install chocolatey from here. Once the chocolatey is installed you can type following command at the commnd prompt to install Restler.

choco install restler

Install from a zip file

You can also install Restler by downloading a zip file from here and extracting it at the desired location on your computer.

What's Included

Within the download you'll find the following directories and files. You'll see something like this:

• Restler.exe is the Restler executable file.
• All other dll files are Restler dependencies.

AddIns

Most of the Restler functionality is developed as AddIns. Restler AddIns are nuget packages.

How to Install an AddIn

By default there are no AddIns installed. The Command Line Interface of Restler can detect any installed AddIns and can display a list of different AddIns. Run the help command from command prompt to see a list of installed AddIns.

restler -h

As you can see there are no Parsers or AddIns installed. Only a default RestRequestCollectionRunner is installed which comes with Restler (You can also write your own if you want). Lets install a DevHttpClientRepositoryParser. DevHttpClientRepositoryParser parses the repository JSON file produced by Dev Http Client Chrome Extension. You can write your own parsers. To install any AddIn type follwing command from command prompt.

restler --installAddIn <AddIn Name>

For Example

restler --installAddIn RestApiTester.Parsers.DevHttpClientRepositoryParser

Run the help command again and you will see that the Restler command line interface now shows DevHttpClientRepositoryParser under Available Parsers.

Check out the list of all the available AddIns here.

Running a Rest Request Collection

In this section we will see how to run a Rest Request Collection like Dev Http Client Repository JSON file. Procedure for running a Rest Request Collection should be similar for other collections like Postman or any other custom collection that you may have.

We have a simple Dev Http Client Repository to test Reddit API.

We can get follwoing JSON file after exporting this collection to JSON. Save this JSON file as reddit-collection.json.

{
  "version": 3,
  "nodes": [
    {
      "id": "8CB601B3-4088-41E6-869D-DE31FEEB717B",
      "lastModified": "2014-11-21T16:51:57.860-05:00",
      "name": "Reddit",
      "type": "Project"
    },
    {
      "id": "AED2FBFA-9C76-4760-AFDF-E1029D0C7627",
      "lastModified": "2014-11-21T16:50:59.108-05:00",
      "name": "Get Hot ",
      "headers": [],
      "method": {
        "link": "http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html#sec9.3",
        "name": "GET"
      },
      "body": {
        "autoSetLength": true,
        "bodyType": "Text"
      },
      "headersType": "Form",
      "type": "Request",
      "uri": {
        "path": "www.reddit.com/r/hot.json",
        "scheme": {
          "name": "http",
          "version": "V11"
        }
      },
      "parentId": "8CB601B3-4088-41E6-869D-DE31FEEB717B"
    },
    {
      "id": "AFE055DF-5F7B-42D9-9B54-62A7F25029CA",
      "lastModified": "2014-11-21T16:51:57.861-05:00",
      "name": "Get Top for C#",
      "headers": [],
      "method": {
        "link": "http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html#sec9.3",
        "name": "GET"
      },
      "body": {
        "autoSetLength": true,
        "bodyType": "Text"
      },
      "headersType": "Form",
      "type": "Request",
      "uri": {
        "path": "www.reddit.com/r/csharp/top.json",
        "scheme": {
          "name": "http",
          "version": "V11"
        }
      },
      "parentId": "8CB601B3-4088-41E6-869D-DE31FEEB717B"
    }
  ]
}

Type following command in the command prompt to run our reddit collection using Restler. Please refer to the Options section in this documentation to learn about all the command line options available for Restler.

restler --collection reddit-collection.json --parser DevHttpClientRepositoryParser

Restler will run all the REST Requests in reddit-collection.json file. You should see an output similar to the following screenshot.

Options

Options:
  --collection       Specify path to REST Request Collection file.
  --parser           Specify parser for parsing collection file.
  --configuration    Specify configuration as a JSON file.
  --environment      Specify one of the environments in your configuration.
  --installAddIn     Specify name of the AddIn to be installed.
  --help             Displays this help screen.

Available AddIns

• RestApiTester.Parsers.DevHttpClientRepositoryParser
• RestApiTester.AddIns.BasicAuthenticationAddIn

To Do

• Complete the documentation. Write documentation about the configuration file.
• Remove some dependencies like FluentValidation, Ninject and Command Line Parser.
• Use ILMerge to create a single executable file for Restler.
• Create HTML Report Generator Add In.
• Create TFS Integration Add In.
• Write parser for Postman collection.