API Discovery

Before you can automate an API, you need to understand it. Documentation is often incomplete, outdated, or missing entirely. The pages in this section cover systematic approaches to mapping an unfamiliar API.

What you will find here

Working with OpenAPI Specs: Many APIs publish machine-readable specifications. Learn to fetch, explore, and extract useful information from OpenAPI/Swagger documents using jq.
API Exploration with curl: When there is no spec (or the spec is wrong), curl in verbose mode is the ground truth. Systematic probing reveals endpoints, authentication requirements, and response structures.

Why discovery matters

Most API documentation tells you what the vendor wants you to use. Discovery tells you what actually exists. Hidden endpoints, undocumented parameters, deprecated-but-functional paths — these appear in specs and headers but not always in the human-readable docs.

netapi vendor definitions are built from discovery. You explore an API, map its surface, and encode what you find into a definition that the CLI can consume.