What is Swell? 🌊

Swell is a comprehensive, open-source API testing tool similar to Postman, but with broader support for a wide variety of endpoints and technologies. Swell is able to test REST endpoints (HTTP and HTTP/2), GraphQL endpoints, Server-Side Events (SSE), WebSockets, gRPC, tRPC, WebRTC, and OpenAPI. It also allows for the creation of a mock server to create custom endpoints for front end testing. Another great feature is the ability to stress test server endpoints to see how your API handles a higher traffic load. With all of these great features for API development, Swell has established itself at the forefront of the wave of API testing.

How can I contribute?

Swell was designed through Open Source Labs, a nonprofit, open-source tech accelerator based in New York City. It is maintained primarily via iteration groups that periodically update and improve the app. If you have any interest in Swell, please check out version 1.18 available for all major platforms at our website. If you would like to contribute to the project and carry on the legacy of 90+ past contributors, check out the GitHub repo and/or reach out to OSLabs to get started.

What’s new with v1.18?

• We started off by finalizing the codebase’s conversion to Redux Toolkit, implementing type-safe hooks as recommended by the Redux documentation. We also refactored a number of legacy functions to a more modern and streamlined hook implementation.
• We addressed an outstanding issue that requested the ability to attach files on HTTP requests. You are now able to select binary in the body drop down tab and attach a file of your choice that will be sent as binary to your specified endpoint.

• Swell now has dark mode!⚫️⚪️It’s toggleable via the button in the top right-hand corner. Your eyes will thank us later 🙌

• Numerous improvements were made to the TypeScript quality across the codebase, allowing future contributors to more easily identify imported types and minimize type errors.
• Test coverage was expanded to over 60% globally, including unit, integration, and end to end testing using both Jest and Mocha. We primarily focused on the main electron controllers but expanded test coverage in numerous other areas, including testing for new features.
• Additionally, we made Swell more secure by implementing a Content Security Policy (CSP) into the Electron and webpack bundle to generate nonce values for all scripts and styles in order to reduce the possibility of cross-site scripting attacks.
• Documentation for Swell was already quite good for an open-source project, but we made quite a few improvements. Most notably, we added in-depth, step by step instructions for WSL users on how to properly set up your dev environment to work on an Electron app.

What’s next for Swell?

As with any open source project, there are numerous improvements that we wanted to make but were unable to fit into our time budget. The dev readme in the GitHub repo will contain a detailed list of our backlog, but some major points for future contributors include:

• Removing Chai as a production dependency to shrink the bundle size
• Further improving dark mode to universalize styling across the application
• Universalizing the usage of Material UI wherever possible
• Updating the CI/CD pipeline via GitHub actions

Once again, if you’d like to download Swell, we have versions for Mac, Windows, Linux, and more on our website. If you’d like to contribute to this wonderful product, check out our OSLabs GitHub repo. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to any of us at the links below! 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊

Carter Sarkela | GitHub | LinkedIn

Adeeb Bayat | GitHub | LinkedIn

Howard Sun | GitHub | LinkedIn

Michael Underbrink | GitHub | LinkedIn

Karol Krzywon | GitHub | LinkedIn