Validating JSON against Swagger API schema

Question

I created an API spec from some JSON files and I am trying to test if the files validate against the API spec.

There are some good tools to validate against JSON Schema, but I did not have chance to find a tool to validate against specs created in the Swagger (tool for creating API schema). The only solution I found is generating a client/server in the Swagger-Editor, it is quite cumbersome.

Is there already an existing tool to validate JSON against Swagger Schema?

Answer 1

Arnaud in the comments is correct that there are two separate questions here.

Do you want to validate that your spec is a valid OpenAPI (fka. Swagger) spec

You can

• Copy your spec to the online Swagger editor and it will throw errors. A quick dive through the source doesn't tell me what it's using to create those errors, but it doesn't seem to be contacting a server to do it...
• Use the official swagger-parser for Java.
• Use the unofficial swagger-parser for JavaScript (browser or Node).

or validate that an implementation of this spec would produce JSON which is valid regarding your JSON schemas?

In other words, here's some JSON from a request or response body, is it correct?

Swagger relies on another standard called JSON Schema for its schema objects, which are what actually describes the JSON (rather than endpoints or metadata). Swagger uses a subset of JSON Schema (missing: oneOf, patternProperties, among others). To that end, you can use a JSON Schema validator. There are 37 listed here; I'll give a shoutout to this online validator that also supports YAML schemas.

But, when I said Swagger relies on a subset of JSON API, I lied. There are a handful of fixed fields that have special meaning in Swagger that's not part of JSON Schema. One of them is discriminator which is used for polymorphism. I am not aware of a Swagger validator that can process discriminator. There are a fair number of tools for swagger and some claim to do validations, but many are abandonware, meant for old versions, not feature-complete, tied to other technologies, and so on. If there's a mature and well-maintained library that I'm missing, I'd love to know.

Answer 2

If your Swagger JSON is hosted, you could use the following url: http://online.swagger.io/validator/debug?url=your_url

Answer 3

The OpenAPI 2.0 / Swagger schema is available in a few places, it's just a bit hard to find because of the heavy use of the word 'schema' in swagger itself.

• The 'official' home appears to be http://swagger.io/v2/schema.json
• Probably sourced from OpenAPI's repo: https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/blob/master/schemas/v2.0/schema.json
• On schemastore (which has a bunch more!): http://json.schemastore.org/swagger-2.0

So you can point a generic validator at this schema and your document. For example, this works nicely for me using vscode and Red Hat's YAML extension.