API Testing (Playwright + REST Assured)

Comprehensive API testing skill covering both Playwright TypeScript (request fixture, Supertest, Zod) and Java (REST Assured, AssertJ, JSON Schema Validator).

When to Use This Skill

• Create API tests for REST or GraphQL endpoints
• Validate request/response schemas (Zod, JSON Schema)
• Test authentication flows (OAuth2, JWT, API keys, Bearer tokens)
• Verify error handling (400, 401, 403, 404, 409, 422, 500)
• Test pagination, filtering, sorting edge cases
• Validate idempotency for PUT/DELETE operations
• Contract testing between services
• Rate limiting validation

Do NOT Use For

• Browser-driven UI flows (use playwright-e2e-testing for Playwright specs, or webapp-selenium-testing for Selenium)
• Live interactive browser sessions or snapshots (use playwright-cli)
• Visual/layout regression (out of scope — no DOM)
• End-to-end journeys that must drive a real browser across pages

Prerequisites

Core Principles

1. Schema validation on every response — never trust an unvalidated response
2. Test all HTTP status codes — happy path AND error states
3. Auth testing is mandatory — verify 401/403 for protected endpoints
4. Data-driven — test with valid, invalid, boundary, and empty values
5. Stateless where possible — each test cleans up or uses unique data

Quick Reference — Playwright

import { test, expect } from "@playwright/test";

test("GET /api/users returns 200 with valid schema", async ({ request }) => {
  const response = await request.get("/api/users");
  expect(response.ok()).toBeTruthy();
  const body = await response.json();
  expect(body).toMatchObject({ data: expect.any(Array) });
});

Quick Reference — REST Assured

import static io.restassured.RestAssured.*;
import static org.hamcrest.Matchers.*;

import java.util.List;

import org.junit.jupiter.api.DisplayName;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;

@Test
@DisplayName("GET /api/users returns 200 with valid schema")
void getUsers() {
    String token = "test-token";

    given()
        .header("Authorization", "Bearer " + token)
    .when()
        .get("/api/users")
    .then()
        .statusCode(200)
        .body("data", is(instanceOf(List.class)))
        .body("data.size()", greaterThan(0));
}

Red Flags

Stop and reconsider if you see any of these in generated API tests:

• Assertions only on status code with no body/schema validation — an unvalidated response hides contract drift.
• Hardcoded secrets/tokens committed to the test file — read from env or a secrets manager.
• Tests sharing mutable state with no cleanup — flaky and order-dependent.
• Skipping auth tests (no 401/403 assertions on protected endpoints) — security regression risk.
• No coverage of error states (only happy-path 200s) — error handling is untested.

References

Templates

• Playwright API Spec — starter test file for API testing
• REST Assured Test — starter Java test class

Scripts

• API Health Check — validate API endpoints respond correctly

Troubleshooting

Verification

• Schema validation in place — Every response validated against a schema (Zod or JSON Schema)
• Authentication tested — 401 returned for protected endpoints without valid credentials
• Idempotency verified — PUT/DELETE produce same result when called multiple times
• Edge cases covered — Empty payloads, invalid types, boundary values, SQL injection attempts