Set It Up Once, Use It Everywhere: Automating API Client Generation with Orval (Dogs API Demo)

In this video, I walk through a demo of automating API client generation using Orval. With tools like Orval, you can transform your OpenAPI (Swagger) contract into a fully-typed, plug-and-play SDK package for all your applications and APIs.

🔍 What’s covered:

- How to structure an API-first workflow using OpenAPI
- Using Orval to generate reusable, type-safe client SDKs
- Setting up a Dogs API in NestJS
- Consuming the API from two different frontends:
- demo-csr-web-consumer (CSR-based React app)

Discussing developer experience, type safety, hooks with TanStack/ReactQuery, mocks using MSW, and how to scale API usage across multiple teams.

⚙️ GitHub Repo:

💡 Why it matters:
"Set it up once, use it everywhere" isn’t just a motto — it’s a practical way to reduce dev time, eliminate manual errors, and ensure consistency across teams.

🔗 Connect with me

#APIAutomation #Orval #OpenAPI #TypeScript #Kubernetes #PlatformEngineering #DevTools #FrontendDev #BackendDev #ContractFirst