News

SmartBear Releases SwaggerHub Extension for Visual Studio Code

• By John K. Waters
• November 30, 2020

Software development tools maker SmartBear has announced the release of the SwaggerHub extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code), adding yet another cohort to a growing list of API designers with convenient access to its suite of API developer tools, which includes the SwaggerHub Code Editor, SwaggerHub Visual Editor, and SwaggerHub CLI Tool.

"We have made it our mission to meet development teams where they're at and to provide easy integrations to the ecosystem of tools and environments in which they are already working," said Christian Wright, SmartBear's president and chief product officer, in a statement.

SwaggerHub is an integrated API development platform designed to bring together the core capabilities of the open-source Swagger framework with other advanced capabilities. Swagger is a suite of API developer tools for teams and individuals that enables development across the API lifecycle, from design and documentation, to test and deployment. It comprises a mix of open-source, free, and commercially available tools.

The Somerville, MA-based SmartBear acquired Swagger in 2015 and open sourced the Swagger specification later that year, creating the Open API Initiative under the Linux Foundation. The project governs the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification, (the "Swagger spec"). SwaggerHub is an integrated API development platform that brings together all the core capabilities of the open-source Swagger framework, along with additional advanced capabilities to build, document, manage, and deploy your APIs.

"The API development lifecycle has become such a critical and fast-growing part of software development, and our extension for VS Code is one way we're making it easier to seamlessly match developer preferences and allow them to focus on delivering high quality software faster," said Wright.

VS Code is a free, lightweight source code editor from Microsoft used for building and debugging modern Web and cloud applications. In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019 (more than 90,000 developers surveyed), VS Code emerged as the most popular dev environment. Among the most often cited features of the product, and perhaps the key to its popularity, is its ability to run on any desktop. Also cited: it's built-in support for JavaScript and Node.js, and its rich ecosystem of extensions to add new features.

SwaggerHub for VS Code is an example of how VS Code can be extended to include new capabilities, the company says. Within the VS Code environment, API designers can interact seamlessly with the SwaggerHub platform to create, organize, and document APIs.

This new extension allows VS Code users to:

• View and navigate definitions from SwaggerHub Organizations
• Edit and Save API definitions via VS Code to SwaggerHub
• Create new APIs or domains from scratch or using a template
• Delete API definitions by version or the entire definition 
• Manage new versions of API definitions
• Auto mocking to allow for quick API definition testing
• Validate  APIs against the OpenAPI (Swagger) Specification

SwaggerHub users can download a copy of SwaggerHub for VS Code at no charge in the Visual Studio Marketplace.