GitHub - VoidenHQ/voiden: Define, test, and document APIs like a developer, not a SaaS user. No accounts. No lock-in. No telemetry. Just Markdown, Git, hotkeys, and your damn specs.
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Define, test, and document APIs like a developer, not a SaaS user. No accounts. No lock-in. No telemetry. Just Markdown, Git, hotkeys, and your damn specs. - VoidenHQ/voiden

Voiden is an offline-first, git-native API tool built on Markdown Voiden is an API client we have been building that takes a different approach from most existing tools.

It didn’t start with the idea of “building a better Postman”.

A bit of background. Over time, API tooling has become heavyweight: cloud dependencies for local work, forced accounts, proprietary formats, and workflows that break the moment you are offline. On top of that, time wasted on fixing API specs that don’t match the code, docs in separate random tools, tests also separate and an overall governance mess. Not to mention collaboration.

So we asked a simple question: What if an API tool respected how developers already work?

That led to a few core ideas:

  • Offline-first , no accounts, no telemetry
  • Git as the source of truth.
  • Plain text files: specs, tests, and documentation live together in Markdown
  • A programmable interface instead of static forms: requests are composed from reusable blocks (endpoints, headers, auth, params, bodies, etc.) that you can structure the way you want
  • Plugin system for extending functionality rather than bloating the core with new features Some of our core plugins include gRPC,GraphQL,WebSockets,etc…

We have just also updated our docs to welcome community plugins, so teams can extend the tool for their own workflows or integrations. https://docs.voiden.md/docs/plugins/build-a-plugin

We opensourced Voiden because extensibility without openness just shifts the bottleneck. If (API) workflows should be transparent, the tools should be too.

Welcome to try out and share feedback- happy to chat with everyone.

Strong opinions are encouraged. :)

Github : https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden

Download here : https://voiden.md/download

  • Corbin@programming.devEnglish
    8·
    23 hours ago

    I don’t see why I would use this instead of vim. I see that you think it’s a different approach, but it looks like a fairly standard rich-text editor to me; what am I missing?

    • nikolasdimi@lemmy.world
      5·
      23 hours ago

      Hey :) Voiden is not a rich text editor (non offense to rich text editors). It is executable API docs: requests, docs, and explanations that all live in Markdown… and actually run. (Yes, your docs that do stuff). As far as I know it is the first tool to collapse design, testing, and documentation into one file, one format, one workflow. If you know another tool that does this, I genuinely want to hear about it (definitely not trying to be cocky, just curious :)

      • LeFrog@discuss.tchncs.de
        3·
        19 hours ago

        There is rswag which produces openAPI specification files directly from test runs. But of course its mainly working with Ruby (on Rails) and RSpec.

        I like the idea of Voiden!

        • nikolasdimi@lemmy.world
          2·
          7 hours ago

          awesome, thanks for sharing.

          feel free to play around and tell me what you thought - especially around the reusable blocks: most devs we talk with consider this to be the most “different” thing and what is more different than other clients… For me its this one too + the plain text files all the way from specs, tests, docs, context etc…