The web is built on top of RESTful APIs

The way we build Apps usually involves consuming a #RESTful API that we communicate with over HTTP. We design contracts for those #APIs to define the way they work and, to have a formal spec for them, the Swagger IDL was proposed back in 2011 to become the OpenAPI Spec in 2016.

At #Vercel we love #NodeJS and we built almost every service in our system on top of it. We felt the need of having a spec for our API but of course, we never wanted to write it manually. There is almost no support to auto-generate an OpenAPI Spec in the NodeJS ecosystem but since the wide adoption of static typing, it became possible to write a generator for this purpose.

In this talk, we will explore how Vercel API internals evolved since 2017, from a set of minimalistic multi repository services to a #monorepo sitting on a tailored framework. We will see how we built a static analyser tool out of it that allowed us to infer a Spec from the implementation of our APIs and how we integrated it using Vercel in our workflow to get alerted on API changes.

AgentConf is a conference with the focus on #frontend topics. It normally takes place in Dornbirn / Austria with two additional days skiing in Lech.This year it was a digital Conference.