Contracts

OpenAPI

OpenAPI Specification

Adopt Foundation OpenAPI Initiative, Linux Foundation Since 2011

Judgement: Adopt

De-facto REST description with tooling for almost every language.

Originally Swagger (2011), now the de-facto standard for describing REST APIs. Tooling exists for almost every language and platform.

OpenAPI is the reference success story for what an open standard can become. ODCS is essentially trying to do for data what OpenAPI did for REST APIs.

Example

One path, one operation, one response schema — the shape every generator and mock server reads.

openapi: 3.1.0
info:
  title: Orders API
  version: 1.0.0
paths:
  /orders/{id}:
    get:
      operationId: getOrder
      parameters:
        - name: id
          in: path
          required: true
          schema: { type: string }
      responses:
        '200':
          description: The order
          content:
            application/json:
              schema:
                type: object
                required: [id, amount]
                properties:
                  id: { type: string }
                  amount: { type: number }

At a glance

Category
Contracts
Governance
OpenAPI Initiative, Linux Foundation
Status
Stable; OAS 3.1 current
First released
2011

Links

Related standards

Other standards in Contracts.

See OpenAPI in context

Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare OpenAPI against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.