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Have you ever wished you could sanity-check all your published APIs automatically, every single day? Whether you're in the middle of a production rollout or ensuring ongoing reliability, running daily tests on your APIs can catch issues before they affect users or business operations.
With IBM API Connect (SaaS), you can just automatically test all your published APIs using API Hooks. In this blog, we'll walk you through how to set this up and integrate it seamlessly into your CI/CD pipelines.
Automate Sanity Checks for Your APIs
IBM API Connect provides a powerful feature set for automated API testing. Here's the game plan:
Create a Test Suite and Publish Your API Tests
Create an API Hook
Secure It with API Keys and Secrets
Run Everything from the CLI or CI/CD
Step 1: Create and Publish Your API Tests
Inside IBM API Connect, you can generate a test suite and add all the APIs you want to validate regularly. Once created, you can publish these API tests, even for production APIs that your consumers rely on.
Check our official documentation on how to create a test suite and publish it.
Step 2: Create an API Hook
Once your test suite is ready, it’s time to trigger it automatically. This is where API Hooks come in.
You can configure a hook to run your published tests via a simple HTTP request , perfect for automation through scripts, CLI, or pipeline tools.
Learn how to create an API Hook here.
Step 3: Secure Your API Hook with API Keys & Secrets
Security is key when exposing automation endpoints. IBM API Connect allows you to generate API Keys and Secrets for your hooks.
Why This Matters:
API Key: Uniquely identifies the client making the request.
Secret: Ensures the request hasn’t been tampered with.
Best Practices:
Generate unique keys per client
Store keys securely
Pass keys in the Authorization header
Validate every request server-side
With Api Connect creating an API Key and Secret is quite Simple. To create your Key and Secret follow our Full guide on Creating API Keys & Secrets
️ Step 4: Run All Tests from the CLI
Once the hook and keys are set up, you can run all published API tests directly from the command line.
This opens up a world of automation: integrate it with your CI/CD pipeline, run it on a schedule, or even tie it to deployment triggers.
Here's how to run tests from CLI using API Hooks
What Else Can API Hooks Do?
Besides running test suites, API hooks can also Trigger specific published API test cases or get all published tests... To dive deeper: Using API Hooks for more
With IBM API Connect SaaS, running automated daily sanity checks on your published APIs is not just possible, it’s easy, secure, and scalable.
By combining test suites, API hooks, and secure API key access, you can:
Ensure business continuity
Catch issues early
Keep your production APIs reliable
Integrate API testing into your DevOps pipeline
Ready to automate your API sanity checks? Start building your test suite and hook today and take full control of your API quality. Let us know how you’re using API hooks in your workflow or share tips and tricks with the IBM TechXchange community!
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By
Nisha V
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