The Problem

If you do a lot of frontend development, you have probably built a website or an app that interacts with an API.

Interacting with APIs is a big part of frontend development. You might be retrieving information from an API and displaying it on a webpage. You might also be collecting information and sending it to an API.

When you test your changes locally, you may be:

• Populating a response object with hard coded test data (mock)
• Running the API and its resources (databases, additional APIs) locally
• Hitting a DEV or TEST environment of the API
• Something else (let me know in the comments)

These solutions didn’t offer the speed and flexibility I was after.

The Solution

I’ve built a free tool called Spocker to create mock endpoints on the fly. Mock endpoints can be created as easily as filling out a form.

Suppose my frontend application called an API with a GET /person endpoint that returned an object with some information. With Spocker that endpoint is ready within seconds.

Starting Spocker on your machine is as simple as pulling down the repo and running one command. This is accomplished with Docker Compose. If you don’t want to use Docker, there are instructions to run Spocker manually as well.

If you’re done with an endpoint, use the dashboard to manage them:

The Future

Spocker is open source and always will be. The repository is here.

You can read about features and improvements I have planned in the backlog section at the bottom of the README.

I firmly believe collaboration and community are what make open source software both a beautiful and powerful thing. I am open to any kind of suggestions, feedback, criticisms.

Thanks for reading! Please give Spocker a star if you found it interesting!