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Hands-on With Spectral: Using API Linting for Better API Design and Governance [Video]

Spectral is an open-source API linting tool that allows users to write rules which then can be used to check API descriptions. Typically, these would be in description languages such as OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, or Swagger. If you’re interested in an overview and an introduction, check out this interview with Spectral maintainer Phil Sturgeon where he walks us through the history of Spectral, what it does, and how it can be used.

7 Steps

In this article and presentation, we’re diving a bit deeper. Axway Catalyst, Chris Wood walks us through seven steps in which you can learn how to use Spectral for an increasingly powerful set of tasks. This means you can start making Spectral part of your API platform and your API governance with very little effort and can level up the way you’re using it over time.

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API Linting With Spectral | What Is It and How Does It Work?

API linting is the process of making sure that APIs are not just technically correct (which is the realm of validation tooling), but that they also comply with a set of additional constraints that often are documented in the form of API guidelines. With the growing popularity of APIs, these guidelines become more common, APIs throughout organizations become more abundant, and it thus becomes more important to be able to scale the API practice in organizations. API linting can help with this because it allows you to check and enforce (some aspects of) API guidelines, making it easier for API teams to follow guidelines and making it easier for API platform teams to make sure that guidelines are being followed.

In this interview, Stoplight's Phil Sturgeon talks about Spectral. Spectral is an open-source general-purpose JSON/YAML linter, but it does come with built-in support for API-related formats such as OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and JSON Schema. We discuss why Spectral is useful and what Spectral can do to help with managing APIs and API landscapes.