Intro

Hello, and welcome to this course. This course is going to be a hands-on guide to API testing with the Karate Test automation framework. In this course, we're going to set up and configure a development environment for writing Karate Tests.

We'll be writing API tests against a simple demonstration application and exploring a lot of the core features of Karate along the way. So before we get going on the course, just a few words about me quickly. My name is James Willett and I'm a principal software engineer with around 15 or so years of experience. I've got quite a large background in automation and performance testing, and I'm an online instructor as well. I actually have around 20,000 students across my courses and most of my courses are based on test automation and test performance or things to do with API testing essentially. You can follow my courses on platforms like Udemy and even Pluralsight, where I recently launched a new Karate course as well. Do feel free to check out my LinkedIn profile as well. I really enjoy connecting with other developers especially those that are learning test automation and tools like Karate.

Let's take a look at what we're going to cover in this course. So we're just going to start out with a brief introduction to Karate and go over some of the core features of this tool. Now, as this course is going to be very hands-on, there are going to be a few prerequisites that you should have installed in order to follow along with the course. So we're just going to go over those quickly and just make sure that you've got everything set up so that you can follow along with the coding examples. Once we've covered the prerequisites, then we'll go through getting our development environment set up. And to do this, we're going to be cloning basically a demonstration application that we're going to be writing tests against, and we'll also be getting our Karate environment set up for where we'll be writing our test automation code.

With our development environment set up, we're then going to get straight into writing API tests using the Karate Framework. And that's what the bulk of this course is going to be writing Karate Tests, exploring its features, refactoring the code that we write, etc.. Well then finish this course with some discussion on the next steps and give you some ideas of where you can go next to continue learning about Karate.

This is a snapshot of a few of the concepts that we're going to cover in this course. We're going to learn a bit about the Karate IDE plugin, and Karate basically has a plugin for both Visual Studio code and IntelliJ that makes writing Karate Tests much easier. So we're going to be installing that for Visual Studio code and seeing how that helps us to write our tests. We're going to be watching lots of Karate Tests and we're going to cover all of the basic HTTP verbs, i.e. get Post, Put, and Delete. We'll also be seeing how we can apply configuration into the Karate config file and how we can use that within our tests and within our Karate automation framework. We'll be seeing how we can use tags in Karate to set only specific tests run in our framework upon execution. We'll also be seeing how we can refactor our test with Karate code into different files and then call them from within different parts of our framework. And finally, we're also going to take a look at how we can apply data-driven testing in Karate as well. So let's kick things off with a quick overview of Karate.