Useful tools for developing endpoints & mocking REST services & data

Working on a modern application often requires making web requests to web services. Sometimes the API endpoint is not complete, or accessible during development. Here are a few sites and services that I use to continue development on the client while waiting for the API to be complete.

Beeceptor – Rest API Mock Server

Beeceptor (https://beeceptor.com/) allows you to create endpoints that respond with data that you provide ahead of time. No coding is required. Simply choose a name (which becomes the base url of your endpoints) and define rules for each endpoint required. Rules will define the type and content of data returned.

Additional features include inspection of http request/response traffic, http latency simulation, CORS support and more.

Mockaroo – Mock Data Generator

Mockaroo (https://www.mockaroo.com/) is a tool to generate realistic data, which is often needed for mock endpoints.

Easily define the number of fields and their data types and select the number of rows to be generated. Data can be outputted in a number of common formats including CSV, JSON and SQL which can be easily imported into databases or added to mock API endpoints.

Mockaroo supports many complex data types for fields and a simple scripting syntax allows for altering or customizing field values.

Advanced Rest Client – HTTP API Testing Tool

Backstory: I used to be a huge fan of Postman. It was a lightweight app that allowed you to create and test HTTP requests. Of course, the smart people use CURL for this, but I find CURL to be clunky and cumbersome. Postman did the job perfectly. The features included everything I needed to do, but over time, as Postman was updated with new features, the application started to feel bloated. One day Postman told me that I needed to sign-in with my Google account in order to continue and that’s where they lost me. True, Postman has since grown into a full-featured HTTP debugging tool, but that’s not what I wanted. All I really needed was a tool to help me make HTTP requests without having to stumble around in the command line with CURL.

Advanced Rest Client (https://install.advancedrestclient.com/install). This application is basically everything I loved about Postman but without all the extra cruft. It’s a stand-alone application and runs on Mac, Linux and Windows. I’ll admit that it is missing some of the fine touches that Postman had, but what it lacks in polish, it makes up for in ease of use. If you want to make HTTP requests without the hassle of multi-line esoteric CURL commands, Advanced Rest Client is what you need.