OpenAPI as a Contract: Best Practices and Implementation
Beyond documentation, OpenAPI serves as an executable contract for API development. This chapter explores practical implementation patterns, from contract validation to tool integration. You’ll learn how to design intuitive APIs with consistent resources, error handling, and asynchronous operations while discovering how contract-first approaches transform team collaboration. In this chapter, we will talk about the following:
- OpenAPI as a contract for your API
- Best practices for using OpenAPI Specification
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to implement OpenAPI as a binding contract for your APIs and apply industry best practices for API design, including resource structuring, error handling, and asynchronous operations. You will also know how to leverage the OpenAPI ecosystem to transform your development workflow through contract-first approaches and automated tooling.
