Karate: Web Services Testing Made Simple

Intuit has open-sourced Karate, a framework that makes the tall claim that the business of testing web-APIs can actually be — fun.

I know what you must be thinking. There’s no way that making HTTP requests and navigating the forest of data that is returned could be fun.

But really, that’s what developers who tried Karate had to say. It actually didn’t surprise us. Karate was born out of a strong dissatisfaction with the current state of solutions that exist. A lot of thought went into Karate to keep it simple and elegant, to allow the user to focus on the functionality instead of boiler-plate, and to keep things concise.

Karate strives to reduce the entry barrier to writing a test and, more importantly, reduces the friction to maintain a test because of how readable tests become.

The obligatory “Hello World” example may throw some light on the unique approach that Karate takes.

So, if you found that compelling, and if you or your teams are in the business of testing complex web-service APIs, be it REST, SOAP, JSON, XML or GraphQL — do check out Karate.

Karate is in the early stages of adoption by teams within Intuit, but we decided to open-source this right away, so as to accelerate the process of community feedback. It is our firm belief that Karate is already equipped to take on the challenge of testing any real-world web-service, and the feature-list on the home page is a testament to this.

Your feedback can make it more awesome. It would be great to see your feature requests on the GitHub project page, and do pass on the link to those who you feel would benefit from what Karate has to offer.

And remember, testing web services can be fun!