Swagger Introduction

Swagger is a simple yet powerful representation of your RESTful API. With the largest ecosystem of API tooling on the planet, thousands of developers are supporting Swagger in almost every modern programming language and deployment environment. With a Swagger-enabled API, you get interactive documentation, client SDK generation and discoverability. it's 100% open source software. A Powerful INTERFACE to your API.

We created Swagger to help fulfill the promise of APIs. Swagger helps companies like Apigee, Getty Images, Intuit, LivingSocial, McKesson, Microsoft, Morningstar, and PayPal build the best possible services with RESTful APIs.

The goal of Swagger™ is to define a standard, language-agnostic interface to REST APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation, or through network traffic inspection. When properly defined via Swagger, a consumer can understand and interact with the remote service with a minimal amount of implementation logic. Similar to what interfaces have done for lower-level programming, Swagger removes the guesswork in calling the service.

How do I get started?

If you're an API provider and want to use Swagger to describe your APIs - there are several approaches available:

• A top-down approach where you would use the Swagger Editor to create your Swagger definition and the use the integrated Swagger Codegen tools to generate server implementation.

• A bottom-up approach where you have an existing REST API for which you want to create a Swagger definition. Either you create the definition manually (using the same Swagger Editor mentioned above), or if you are using one of the supported frameworks (JAX-RS, node.js, etc), you can get the Swagger definition generated automatically for you.

If on the other hand you're an API Consumer who wants to integrate with an API that has a Swagger definition you can use the online version of the Swagger UI to explore the API (given that you have a URL to the APIs Swagger definition) - and then use Swagger Codegen to generate the client library of your choice.