A Practical Guide to Swagger and Springdoc Open API in Spring Boot Document

What is API Documentation

API documentation is a comprehensive guide or reference manual that provides information about how to use and interact with an Application Programming Interface (API). It serves as a crucial resource for developers, clients, and other stakeholders who need to understand how to integrate with the API and leverage its functionality in their applications or systems.

Why Swagger?

Swagger is a powerful framework for designing, building, documenting, and consuming RESTful APIs. It provides a set of tools and specifications that streamline the API development process and improve collaboration between developers, testers, and other stakeholders. Here are some reasons why Swagger is widely used

Step 1: Adding Dependencies

In Swagger, adding dependencies typically refers to including external libraries or modules in your project that Swagger will use for various functionalities, such as generating API documentation, handling API requests, and performing other tasks. Here’s how you can add dependencies in Swagger.

Step 2: Controller Annotations

Next, annotate your controller methods with Swagger annotations such as @Operation, @Parameter, and @ApiResponses. These annotations provide valuable metadata about your API endpoints.

• @Operation: Describes an operation or endpoint with a summary of its functionality.
• @Parameter: Specifies parameters for the operation, such as request body or query parameters.
• @ApiResponses: Defines possible responses for the operation, including HTTP status codes and descriptions.

Step 3: Swagger Configuration

Swagger configuration typically involves setting up and configuring Swagger tools to generate API documentation based on your code and annotations. Below, I’ll outline the steps for configuring Swagger in a Spring Boot application, which is a common scenario.

In this configuration class:

• Within this method:
• We instantiate a new OpenAPI object.
• We add security requirements using the addSecurityItem() method, specifying the scheme name.
• We define components, including security schemes, using the components() method. Here, we specify the security scheme details previously defined.
• We provide metadata about our API, such as title, description, and version, using the info() method.

Step 4: Documentation and Testing

With the configurations and annotations in place, Swagger UI will automatically generate documentation for your API endpoints. You can access the documentation by navigating to /swagger-ui.html in your web browser.

Conclusion:

And that’s all there is to it! This guide should have provided you with a straightforward approach to documenting your APIs using Swagger and Springdoc Open API in Spring Boot. Thanks for reading, and best of luck with your API documentation journey!