Chakram is an API testing framework that is designed to perform end to end testing of JSON REST endpoints.

The library offers a BDD testing style and fully exploits javascript promises – the resulting tests are simple, clear and expressive. Chakram is built on node.js, mocha and chai.

 

Features

Chakram offers a depth of features. Some of them are :

• HTTP specific assertions. Allows testing of:
  • Status codes
  • Cookie presence and value
  • Header presence and value
  • JSON values
  • JSON structure (using the JSON schema specification)
  • Compression
  • Response times

• BDD formatting and hooks (e.g. beforeEach, afterEach)
• Promise based
• Plugin support
• Custom assertions
• Exports results in a variety of formats
• Debugging support

 

Installation

Chakram comes as an npm module so it is very easy to install. However, since it requires both node.js and npm , please make sure to have both of these installed before installing Chakram.

Once you have both these dependencies, it is easy to install Chakram as

npm install chakram --save-dev

This will install Chakram in your project and if you have a package.json file in your project, it will automatically be added to the dependencies.

In the next section, we’ll see how we can make simple GET or POST requests using Chakram.