api-dev

What This Skill Does

The api-dev skill is a comprehensive toolkit designed to manage the entire lifecycle of HTTP-based APIs directly from your terminal. It empowers developers to scaffold endpoints, conduct rigorous integration testing, generate professional-grade OpenAPI documentation, and perform deep-dive troubleshooting for REST and GraphQL services. By leveraging standard CLI utilities like curl and jq, it provides a transparent and reproducible environment for API development, eliminating the friction often found in GUI-based clients. Whether you are building from scratch or maintaining complex microservices, this skill acts as your primary interface for interacting with remote and local web services.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/gitgoodordietrying/api-dev Ensure your system has curl and jq installed, as these are the primary dependencies for the skill's core functions.

Use Cases

This skill is highly versatile and serves several critical roles in software engineering:

1. API Prototyping: Quickly scaffold new endpoints and test the request/response cycle without needing a full frontend.
2. Quality Assurance: Use the integrated shell script runner to automate sanity checks and integration tests for your CI/CD pipelines.
3. Documentation Automation: Automatically generate or validate OpenAPI (Swagger) specifications to ensure your documentation never falls out of sync with your implementation.
4. Advanced Troubleshooting: Use verbose curl flags and timing metrics to diagnose latency, connection drops, or SSL handshake failures.
5. Mocking Services: Easily simulate external API behaviors to allow for frontend development even when backends are unavailable.

Example Prompts

• "Can you help me test my new /users POST endpoint? I need to verify that it correctly handles a JSON payload and returns a 201 Created status."
• "My API is returning a 500 error intermittently. Could you help me write a script using curl to hit the endpoint repeatedly and capture the verbose response headers for debugging?"
• "Generate an OpenAPI 3.0 specification for my existing user authentication service based on these headers and response examples."

Tips & Limitations

• Security: Be cautious when using hardcoded API tokens or secrets in command-line arguments. Always prefer environment variables (e.g., $TOKEN) to keep sensitive data out of your command history.
• Formatting: Since the skill heavily uses jq, ensure your API responses are valid JSON. If an API returns plain text or HTML, manual parsing may be required.
• Performance: For heavy load testing, while this skill is excellent for baseline verification, consider dedicated load testing tools for high-concurrency production benchmarking.