First, thank you for contributing to our Azure specs repository! Specs are the basis for generating Azure SDKs in multiple different languages, Azure CLIs for interacting with the services, and can provide documentation for these services.
In the Azure Developer Experience workflow, you are at Step 3:
API Design Review -> Engage with ADX team -> Swagger specification -> SDKs -> CLIs
If you're a spec author looking for information about all of of the repositories and steps in the pipeline, go back to the adx-documentation-pr repository. Make sure to join the Github Azure organization to get access to that repo.
Make sure that your Github account is part of the Azure organization. Use this page to link your account.
Before cloning this repository, please make sure you have started in our documentation repository adx-documentation-pr (you will only have access to that page if you are part of the Azure organization).
If you don't have experience with Git and Github, some of the terminology and process can be confusing. Here's a guide to understanding Github.
Unless you are working with multiple contributors on the same file, we ask that you fork the repository and submit your Pull Request from there. Here's a guide to forks in Github.
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.
Swagger files are simply JSON files that follow the OpenAPI Specification. This specification is extensible, and there are extensions that are used by AutoRest when your SDK is generated. Additionally, there are patterns and standards that are necessary for generating quality SDKs and CLIs.
The /documentation folder contains many resources for writing Swagger files.
The Swagger Good Patterns page is intended as a guide for different scenarios. If you know the service behavior that you're trying to model (e.g. PUT/PATCH/GET responses and request schemas, or modeling long running operations), that document is structured to make it easy to find our recommendations.
The Reference Documentation page contains lots of information about each part of a Swagger file and how to structure it correctly for code generation. If you're looking for an explanation of what a part of Swagger relates to your service or how it's used to generate code, that document is the right place to go.
The Linter page has instructions for downloading our extension for VS Code and links to explanations for each validation error or warning.
- Swagger spec for every api-version should be in a separate folder named with the api-version.
- It is time consuming to review the file line by line for every api-version. When you are creating the swagger spec for the new api-version, please copy the swagger spec from the previous version in to the new api-versioned folder and commit it. After that overwrite it with the changes for the new api-version. This makes it easy for us to review the changes.
As JSON files, specs can be modified in any text editor that you choose. We have some recommendations that can make editing these files easier.
- Recommended Our Linter extension for VS Code provides validation, go to definition support, HTML preview of the spec, and other ease-of-use improvements.
- Visual Studio can also provide a nice experience for editing JSON, though it takes extra work to use the JSON schema that defines Swagger files. Additionally, there will be extra work later to make sure any validation rules are followed. Both of these are automatically handled with the extension for VS Code.
There are some tools that can help you make sure your spec doesn't contain basic errors. The more of these issues that are caught before the PR is sent, the quicker the turnaround to merging the PR will be.
- Recommended Our Linter extension for VS Code provides validation for common issues we see in specs. If we see any of the issues during the review process, we will ask you to use this extension before we continue reviewing.
AutoRest.exewill output the same errors as the VS Code extension if you run it from the command line. AutoRest is used in the next step in the pipeline, SDK generation. If you add the-ValidationLevel Warningflag or-Verbose, the command line output will include validation messages. See the AutoRest documentation for more info.- The OpenAPI Initiative Swagger editor will help find basic issues in a Swagger file. However, we apply a higher bar than this validator - just because this site doesn't show errors doesn't mean the spec is ready to merge.
- Similarly, this online schema validator can help find basic errors. Again, we apply a higher bar than this validator - just because this site doesn't show errors doesn't mean the spec is ready to merge.
- In the upper left box, paste the swagger schema from here
- In the lower left box, paste your swagger json
- Upon clicking the validate button, you should either see errors or success.
Please send a GitHub Pull Request to Azure REST API Specs with a clear list of what you've done (read more about pull requests). When you send a pull request, we will love you forever if you include additions to the documentation for your given service. We can always use more documentation and beautiful markdown. Please follow make sure all of your commits are atomic (one feature per commit).
Always write a clear log message for your commits. One-line messages are fine for small changes, but bigger changes should look like this:
$ git commit -m "A brief summary of the commit
>
> A paragraph describing what changed and its impact."
Please be kind with your pull requests and ensure you keeping them as focused and cohesive as possible. Keep your pull request free of merge commits, code review fixes and anything that may take away from the essence of your contribution. Use the git tools you have available to you, such as amend, rebase, etc.
We review spec PRs to maintain a high bar of quality for all products that will be generated from these specs (including SDKs in all languages, CLIs and documentation). It's critical that spec files are both sytactically and semantically correct, as well as conform to common patterns that make it possible to generate SDKs and CLIs that are usable for customers. Since specs are the base input for all of these products, the review process starts with PRs to this repository.
Our SLA for reviewing specs is 2 business days. We are committed to either merging the PR or providing you with a set of changes that are required before we can merge. Please be aware that the process can take longer if there are major changes requested after the initial review (since we will need to review the spec again).
This section lists what we look for when reviewing a PR. This constantly changes as we discover issues in specs that cause SDK or CLI issues. Standard patterns for common scenarios also change as we support more functionality in generated code or try to improve the experience for users of the SDKs.
The following criteria are ordered from least to most stringent. The expectation is that every spec in a PR will be correct JSON, syntactically correct, will semantically agree with the service it applies to, and will follow the recommended patterns except for special circumstances.
A spec file must be valid JSON, according to the JSON specification. It must also be a valid Swagger file, according to the OpenAPI Specification. Finally, it must also conform to the schema that AutoRest applies.
Recommendation: Use our Linter extension for VS Code when editing your spec. It will show JSON errors and use the correct Swagger schema to the file.
There are certain issues in spec files that make it impossible to generate working SDK code or usable SDKs, CLIs or documentation. These go beyond JSON or Swagger schema correctness, since a Swagger file could correctly describe an API yet still generate a bad SDK.
Recommendation: Use our Linter extension for VS Code when editing your spec. It will catch these errors automatically and underline the file wherever there are errors.
Your spec file must correctly represent your service. Even if a spec passes all of the rules listed above, it might not accurately describe the service that it is intended to describe. This could include
- Incorrect schemas for responses or requests (both missing and superfluous properities)
- Missing operations
- Missing parameters (especially required ones)
- etc (this list is not comprehensive)
Making sure that the spec is correct from a semantic point of view requires domain knowledge and careful comparison of your spec file with your actual service. We will do our best to point out inconsistencies between spec and service if we can infer them, but you are responsible for making sure your spec and service agree.
Recommendation: Check each operation, parameter, schema, property to make sure it accurately models the service API. Refer back to the Reference documentation for more details on every part of Swagger.
Following good patterns are an even higher standard than semantic correctness. These ensure that we provide a good experience across all Azure SDKs and CLIs. We manually check to make sure your spec follows these patterns, and we expect that any author sending a PR has checked their spec by hand as well.
Recommendation: Refer to our Swagger Recommended Patterns page. We expect that a spec will follow these patterns by default unless there is a good reason to deviate (e.g. the service behaves differently from the Azure API Guidelines for an old api-version).