Api linting
API linting is the automated analysis of an API description or design against rules for correctness, consistency, security, and maintainability.
Automating API Delivery
An API linter is a tool that evaluates API definitions against configurable rules and reports violations.
- How it is used
- Checks API definitions against style-guide rules during design and continuous integration.
- How deep it goes
- Explains ruleset inputs, Spectral rules and overrides, and a pipeline step; leaves detailed API design outside its scope.
- Examples
- Uses Spectral CLI output, targeted rule overrides, a GitHub Actions pull-request job, and HTTPS and sensitive-field warnings.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Spectral to check definitions locally and in a pull-request pipeline, adjusting rules and severities to organizational policy.
The Design of Web APIs, Second Edition
API linting is the automated analysis of an API description or design for violations of quality, consistency, security, and maintainability rules.
- How it is used
- Automates API design guidelines during design and development to catch consistency, usability, security, and authoring problems.
- How deep it goes
- Covers practical rule automation and feedback, but stops short of judging whether designs meet consumer needs or broader API context.
- Examples
- Uses casing, pagination, security scopes, path parameters, request schemas, and search operations as concrete linting targets.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Spectral to automate, customize, share, document, and selectively ignore API guideline checks.
Read how The Design of Web APIs, Second Edition explains api linting →
Related concepts
- OpenAPI specificationuses · The OpenAPI Specification is a standard, machine-readable format for describing HTTP APIs, including their operations, inputs, outputs, data structures, and security requirements.
- rulesetuses · A ruleset is an organized collection of rules applied together to evaluate inputs, guide decisions, or govern behavior.
- language modelused by · A language model is a computational model that represents patterns in linguistic tokens to estimate sequence probabilities and predict or generate language from context.
- api styleconfigured by · An API style guide is a documented set of conventions for designing, naming, documenting, securing, and evolving APIs.
- review processalternative to · A review process is a structured evaluation of work, performance, artifacts, or proposals against relevant criteria to assess quality, progress, correctness, or suitability.
- consistencymeasures · Consistency is the property of related data, behavior, outputs, or states agreeing with one another or conforming to defined rules across relevant instances or operations.
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