Needed advice to automate REST services test

I am kind of new to REST and testing dept. I needed to write automation scripts to test our REST services. We are planning to run these scripts from a Jenkins CI job regularly. I prefer writing these in python as we already have UI functionality testing scripts in python generated by selenium IDE, but I am open to any good solution. I checked httplib, simplejson and Xunit, but looking for better solutions available out there.

And also, I would prefer to write a template and generate actual script for each REST API by reading API info from XML or something.

Solution

I usually use Cucumber to test my restful APIs. The following example is in Ruby, but could easily be translated to python using either the rubypy gem or lettuce.

Start with a set of RESTful base steps:

When /^I send a GET request for "([^\"]*)"$/ do |path|
  get path
end

When /^I send a POST request to "([^\"]*)" with the following:$/ do |path, body|
  post path, body
end

When /^I send a PUT request to "([^\"]*)" with the following:$/ do |path, body|
  put path, body
end

When /^I send a DELETE request to "([^\"]*)"$/ do |path|
  delete path
end

Then /^the response should be "([^\"]*)"$/ do |status|
  last_response.status.should == status.to_i
end

Then /^the response JSON should be:$/ do |body|
  JSON.parse(last_response.body).should == JSON.parse(body)
end

And now we can write features that test the API by actually issuing the requests.

Feature: The users endpoints

  Scenario: Creating a user
    When I send a POST request to "/users" with the following:
      """
      { "name": "Swift", "status": "awesome" }
      """
    Then the response should be "200"

  Scenario: Listing users
    Given I send a POST request to "/users" with the following:
      """
      { "name": "Swift", "status": "awesome" }
      """
    When I send a GET request for "/users"
    Then the response should be "200"
    And the response JSON should be:
      """
      [{ "name": "Swift", "status": "awesome" }]
      """

   ... etc ...

These are easy to run on a CI system of your choice. See these links for references: