api-tester-cn

What This Skill Does

The api-tester-cn skill is a comprehensive CLI-based toolkit designed for developers, QA engineers, and system administrators to streamline the lifecycle of API testing and debugging. It acts as a bridge between your local terminal and remote API endpoints, allowing for rapid health checks, structural validation, and behavioral analysis. Beyond simple requests, the tool enables you to enforce best practices through linting, compare differences between API versions to ensure backward compatibility, and manage a persistent history of your test executions for auditability.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/bytesagain/api-tester-cn

Once installed, ensure your environment is configured by checking the tool status: scripts/script.sh status. You may optionally configure the storage directory by setting the API_TESTER_CN_DIR environment variable to a location of your choice, though it defaults to ~/.api-tester-cn/.

Use Cases

• Continuous Integration Monitoring: Quickly verify that staging environments are returning correct headers and status codes before triggering deployments.
• Contract Testing: Use the validate command to ensure that the JSON structure of an API response matches expected schemas, preventing breaking changes.
• Migration Support: Utilize the diff command when updating API versions (e.g., from v1 to v2) to verify that payload structures remain consistent or to inspect expected discrepancies.
• Documentation & Workflow Efficiency: Save complex request sequences as reusable templates to quickly reproduce bugs or verify specific endpoints across different sessions.
• Compliance & Optimization: Use the lint command to ensure your APIs comply with modern standards such as HTTPS enforcement, proper caching headers, and rate-limiting visibility.

Example Prompts

1. "Check the status and lint the API endpoint at https://api.myproject.com/v1/data to ensure it's secure and properly cached."
2. "Use the api-tester-cn skill to compare the response structure of these two endpoints: https://api.v1.example.com/items and https://api.v2.example.com/items."
3. "Save a new request template called 'get-user-profile' for a GET request to https://api.github.com/user, then execute it."

Tips & Limitations

• Templates: Always give your templates descriptive names to avoid collision in your local database. Use template list to view your current library.
• Data Privacy: Be mindful that test history is stored locally; if you are testing sensitive endpoints with PII (Personally Identifiable Information), ensure the data directory is encrypted.
• Performance: While the tool is excellent for debugging, it is not intended for high-frequency load testing. Avoid running rapid, repeated commands that might trigger rate limits on your target APIs.