Your first API test

What you'll learn

How an API scenario is tagged, which shared steps send requests and assert on responses, and how automax run -l api executes it without launching a browser.

Write the feature

Create projects/demo-shop/features/api/posts.feature:

@api @smoke
Feature: Posts API
  Scenario: Read a single post
    When I send a GET request to "/posts/1"
    Then the response status should be 200
    And the response JSON path "id" should equal "1"
    And the response time should be under 2000 ms

Two tags matter: @api selects the layer, @smoke selects the suite. automax lint refuses a scenario without exactly one of each.

Send a body and chain values

@api @regression
Feature: Posts API
  Scenario: Create then read
    When I send a POST request to "/posts" with body:
      """json
      { "title": "AutoMax", "body": "hello", "userId": 1 }
      """
    Then the response status should be 201
    When I save the response JSON path "id" as "postId"
    And I send a GET request to "/posts/{{postId}}"
    Then the response status should be 200

{{postId}} is rendered from variables captured in the same scenario, plus vars from the environment file and any loaded dataset row.

Validate against a schema

    Then the response should match the JSON schema "schemas/post.schema.json"

JSON Schema (via ajv), Zod modules and OpenAPI operations are supported. See the step library.

Run it

bun run automax run -p demo-shop -e staging -l api
bun run automax run -p demo-shop -e staging -l api -t @smoke

-l api runs the Playwright project demo-shop--api, which has no browser device. The base URL, headers and authentication come from envs/staging.yaml (api.baseUrl, api.headers, api.auth).

What you get

Every request attaches request.json and response.json (with Authorization redacted) to the scenario, so the HTML report and the run viewer show the exact exchange.