Welcome to www.badapi.net, a REST API with badly-behaved endpoints

August 14, 2014 · 1 min read

I've had a need in a few projects for a REST API that doesn't behave well - takes a long time to respond, or never responds, returns unexpected status codes etc.

That can be very useful for testing that clients cope gracefully with unexpected responses.

Till now I've always coded a stub API in the project and run it locally, but I've put a few 'misbehaved' endpoints together and published them at, and the source is on GitHub here: sixeyed/badapi.net.

You can browse to the home page and see the available endpoints. I'll be adding more as I think of them, and I may give the styling of the help pages a bit more thought...

As of today's release, the misbehaving endpoints available to you are:

GET longrunning?between={between}&and={and} - Waits for a (short) random period before returning GET verylongrunning?between={between}&and={and} -Waits for a (long) random period before returning GET internalservererror    - Returns 500: Internal Server Error GET badrequest - Returns 400: BadRequest GET notfound - Returns 404: Not Found GET unauthorized - Returns 401: Unauthorized GET forbidden - Returns 403: Forbidden GET conflict -Returns 409: Conflict GET status/{code}?reason={reason} - Returns the provided status code

Go bad.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Elton Stoneman

New on Geeks with Blogs

  • We Won The One Award I Actually Care About

    Full Scale made the Inc. 5000 for the fifth year straight, the 12th listing across my three companies. Here is why the one award you cannot buy is worth stopping for.

  • Your Customers Build the Features Now

    I let a tool I liked sit dead for a year rather than build the features I wanted. An MCP server meant I never had to, and your customers can do the same to your product.

  • Get the Size of a Directory in Linux the Easy Way

    du -sh for the quick answer, ncdu for the cleanup, df for the disk itself: every command for checking directory size in Linux, plus why du and df never agree.

  • Vim Search and Replace: The Ultimate Guide

    One :%s command replaces every match in a file before a find dialog would even open. The Vim substitute patterns worth the muscle memory: flags, ranges, capture groups, and multi-file edits.