Wanted to show off my little project which helps whith reverse engneering APIs used by various apps. It takes HTTP traffic capturewd by mitmproxy and generates an OpenAPI specification for a given REST API.
I have used it already on two apps and the results are good enough to write an alternative client or quickly automate some stuff.
Hilarious indeed! The first thing I thought of with this project is actually AirBnB, because the sort/filter/map view is so terrible and missing features. AirBnB captures data on a bunch of stuff, but doesn't make it possible to search for in the UI (ever want a property with a lake view or a sauna? AirBnB knows which ones have those things, but they won't let you look for them!)
AirBnB doesn't have an official API but changes the tags so often that scrapers people put up on Github go out of date quickly. Now I can run this whenever I want to have actual search functionality (instead of the hobbled crap available on the website) and ensure that whatever flavor of API is available on the website that day is easily queryable!
Easier to modify requests vs doing it using browser tools. The ability to search for the things I mentioned is actually there, but only via an undocumented url parameter that erases itself every time you pan the map. Doing it via REST calls is much easier than trying to do it in the UI.
What a fantastic idea! I have so many half baked things that some idiot (me) built without documenting the underlying API. This will make life so much easier
It does, but it will only generate schema descriptions for JSON endpoints. Whis means that the URL and method will appear in the spec, but not the response/request schema.
Comments
Wanted to show off my little project which helps whith reverse engneering APIs used by various apps. It takes HTTP traffic capturewd by mitmproxy and generates an OpenAPI specification for a given REST API.
I have used it already on two apps and the results are good enough to write an alternative client or quickly automate some stuff.
mitmproxy dev here, very awesome! :) This seems to be particularly useful to quickly generate clients for reverse-engineered APIs.
Swagger Editor dev which now works at Airbnb here. This is hilarious!
Hilarious indeed! The first thing I thought of with this project is actually AirBnB, because the sort/filter/map view is so terrible and missing features. AirBnB captures data on a bunch of stuff, but doesn't make it possible to search for in the UI (ever want a property with a lake view or a sauna? AirBnB knows which ones have those things, but they won't let you look for them!)
AirBnB doesn't have an official API but changes the tags so often that scrapers people put up on Github go out of date quickly. Now I can run this whenever I want to have actual search functionality (instead of the hobbled crap available on the website) and ensure that whatever flavor of API is available on the website that day is easily queryable!
How will this let you search for a sauna?
Easier to modify requests vs doing it using browser tools. The ability to search for the things I mentioned is actually there, but only via an undocumented url parameter that erases itself every time you pan the map. Doing it via REST calls is much easier than trying to do it in the UI.
What a fantastic idea! I have so many half baked things that some idiot (me) built without documenting the underlying API. This will make life so much easier
This is a really clever project. It seems like an obvious idea once you've seen it, but it clearly isn't. Thank you for sharing it.
This is great :) You can then fuzz your APIs for issues using https://github.com/Endava/cats.
does it capture route/server rendered pages too?
It does, but it will only generate schema descriptions for JSON endpoints. Whis means that the URL and method will appear in the spec, but not the response/request schema.