OpenAPI Typescript Codegen

Node.js library that generates Typescript clients based on the OpenAPI specification.

Why?

• Frontend ❤️ OpenAPI, but we do not want to use JAVA codegen in our builds
• Quick, lightweight, robust and framework agnostic 🚀
• Supports generation of TypeScript clients
• Supports generations of fetch and XHR http clients
• Supports OpenAPI specification v2.0 and v3.0
• Supports JSON and YAML files for input
• Supports generation through CLI, Node.js and NPX
• Supports tsc and @babel/plugin-transform-typescript

Babel support:

If you use enums inside your models / definitions then those enums are by default inside a namespace with the same name as your model. This is called declaration merging. However, the @babel/plugin-transform-typescript does not support these namespaces, so if you are using babel in your project please use the --useUnionTypes flag to generate union types instead of traditional enums. More info can be found here: Enums vs. Union Types.

Install

npm install openapi-typescript-codegen --save-dev

Usage

$ openapi --help

  Usage: openapi [options]

  Options:
    -V, --version             output the version number
    -i, --input <value>       OpenAPI specification, can be a path, url or string content (required)
    -o, --output <value>      Output directory (required)
    -c, --client <value>      HTTP client to generate [fetch, xhr] (default: "fetch")
    --useOptions              Use options instead of arguments
    --useUnionTypes           Use union types instead of enums
    --exportCore <value>      Write core files to disk (default: true)
    --exportServices <value>  Write services to disk (default: true)
    --exportModels <value>    Write models to disk (default: true)
    --exportSchemas <value>   Write schemas to disk (default: false)

  Examples
    $ openapi --input ./spec.json
    $ openapi --input ./spec.json --output ./dist
    $ openapi --input ./spec.json --output ./dist --client xhr

Example

package.json

{
    "scripts": {
        "generate": "openapi --input ./spec.json --output ./dist"
    }
}

NPX

npx openapi-typescript-codegen --input ./spec.json --output ./dist

Node.js API

const OpenAPI = require('openapi-typescript-codegen');

OpenAPI.generate({
    input: './spec.json',
    output: './dist'
});

// Or by providing the content of the spec directly 🚀
OpenAPI.generate({
    input: require('./spec.json'),
    output: './dist'
});

Features

Argument style vs. Object style --useOptions

There's no named parameter in JavaScript or TypeScript, because of that, we offer the flag --useOptions to generate code in two different styles.

Argument-style:

function createUser(name: string, password: string, type?: string, address?: string) {
    // ...
}

// Usage
createUser('Jack', '123456', undefined, 'NY US');

Object-style:

function createUser({ name, password, type, address }: {
    name: string,
    password: string,
    type?: string
    address?: string
}) {
    // ...
}

// Usage
createUser({
    name: 'Jack',
    password: '123456',
    address: 'NY US'
});

Enums vs. Union Types --useUnionTypes

The OpenAPI spec allows you to define enums inside the data model. By default, we convert these enums definitions to TypeScript enums. However, these enums are merged inside the namespace of the model, this is unsupported by Babel, see docs. Because we also want to support projects that use Babel @babel/plugin-transform-typescript, we offer the flag --useOptions to generate union types instead of the traditional enums. The difference can be seen below:

Enums:

// Model
export interface Order {
    id?: number;
    quantity?: number;
    status?: Order.status;
}

export namespace Order {
    export enum status {
        PLACED = 'placed',
        APPROVED = 'approved',
        DELIVERED = 'delivered',
    }
}

// Usage
const order: Order = {
    id: 1,
    quantity: 40,
    status: Order.status.PLACED
}

Union Types:

// Model
export interface Order {
    id?: number;
    quantity?: number;
    status?: 'placed' | 'approved' | 'delivered';
}

// Usage
const order: Order = {
    id: 1,
    quantity: 40,
    status: 'placed'
}

Runtime schemas --exportSchemas

By default, the OpenAPI generator only exports interfaces for your models. These interfaces will help you during development, but will not be available in JavaScript during runtime. However, Swagger allows you to define properties that can be useful during runtime, for instance: maxLength of a string or a pattern to match, etc. Let's say we have the following model:

{
    "MyModel": {
        "required": [
            "key",
            "name"
        ],
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
            "key": {
                "maxLength": 64,
                "pattern": "^[a-zA-Z0-9_]*$",
                "type": "string"
            },
            "name": {
                "maxLength": 255,
                "type": "string"
            },
            "enabled": {
                "type": "boolean",
                "readOnly": true
            },
            "modified": {
                "type": "string",
                "format": "date-time",
                "readOnly": true
            }
        }
    }
}

This will generate the following interface:

export interface MyModel {
    key: string;
    name: string;
    readonly enabled?: boolean;
    readonly modified?: string;
}

The interface does not contain any properties like maxLength or pattern. However, they could be useful if we wanted to create some form where a user could create such a model. In that form you would iterate over the properties to render form fields based on their type and validate the input based on the maxLength or pattern property. This requires us to have this information somewhere... For this we can use the flag --exportSchemas to generate a runtime model next to the normal interface:

export const $MyModel = {
    properties: {
        key: {
            type: 'string',
            isRequired: true,
            maxLength: 64,
            pattern: '^[a-zA-Z0-9_]*$',
        },
        name: {
            type: 'string',
            isRequired: true,
            maxLength: 255,
        },
        enabled: {
            type: 'boolean',
            isReadOnly: true,
        },
        modified: {
            type: 'string',
            isReadOnly: true,
            format: 'date-time',
        },
    },
};

These runtime object are prefixed with a $ character and expose all the interesting attributes of a model and its properties. We can now use this object to generate the form:

import { $MyModel } from './generated';

// Some pseudo code to iterate over the properties and return a form field
// the form field could be some abstract component that renders the correct
// field type and validation rules based on the given input.
const formFields = Object.entries($MyModel.properties).map(([key, value]) => (
    <FormField
        name={key}
        type={value.type}
        format={value.format}
        maxLength={value.maxLength}
        pattern={value.pattern}
        isReadOnly={value.isReadOnly}
    />
));

const MyForm = () => (
    <form>
        {formFields}
    </form>
);

Enum with custom names and descriptions

You can use x-enum-varnames and x-enum-descriptions in your spec to generate enum with custom names and descriptions. It's not in official spec yet. But it's a supported extension that can help developers use more meaningful enumerators.

{
    "EnumWithStrings": {
        "description": "This is a simple enum with strings",
        "enum": [
            0,
            1,
            2
        ],
        "x-enum-varnames": [
            "Success",
            "Warning",
            "Error"
        ],
        "x-enum-descriptions": [
            "Used when the status of something is successful",
            "Used when the status of something has a warning",
            "Used when the status of something has an error"
        ]
    }
}

Generated code:

enum EnumWithStrings {
    /*
    * Used when the status of something is successful
    */
    Success = 0,
    /*
    * Used when the status of something has a warning
    */
    Waring = 1,
    /*
    * Used when the status of something has an error
    */
    Error = 2,
}

Authorization

The OpenAPI generator supports Bearer Token authorization. In order to enable the sending of tokens in each request you can set the token using the global OpenAPI configuration:

import { OpenAPI } from './generated';

OpenAPI.TOKEN = 'some-bearer-token';

Compare to other generators

Depending on which swagger generator you use, you will see different output. For instance: Different ways of generating models, services, level of quality, HTTP client, etc. I've compiled a list with the results per area and how they compare against the openapi-typescript-codegen.

Click here to see the comparison