Neovim for Beginners — Testing (Part 2)

Use Neovim for REST API testing, and explore new plugins for testing.

Neovim for Beginners — Testing (Part 2)

In this article, we are going to

• Explore plugins for REST API testing.
• Check out new plugins for testing.

This article is part of the Neovim for Beginners series.

The Neovim configuration files can be found in this repository.

This article is part 2 of the following articles related to testing.

• Neovim for Beginners — Testing
• Neovim For Beginners — Test Debugging and Automation

REST API Testing

For REST API testing, there are several available plugins.

vim-rest-console

The vim-rest-console plugin helps send requests to and display responses from RESTful services. It supports GET, POST, PUT, HEAD, PATCH, OPTIONS, and TRACE. This plugin requires cURL.

We will install this plugin using packer.nvim.

use { "diepm/vim-rest-console", ft = { "rest" } }

Now create a file with an .rest extension containing the following endpoint. Alternatively, we can set the file type to rest (:set ft=rest).

https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com
GET /posts

Press <C-j> to execute the request.

Testing GET Request

Similarly, we can execute other kinds of requests. E.g. a POST request.

https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com
POST /posts
{
  "userId": 1,
  "id": 1,
  "title": "post title",
  "body": "post body"
}

Testing POST Request

Check out the project repository for more examples.

This plugin has more features like defining global definitions, specifying cURL options, posting data…