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Tooling and Ecosystem

In addition to an API design specification, AEPs also provide an ecosystem of tooling to help produce and interact with these APIs.

Get started quickly with these essential tools:

Developer Tools

  • terraform-provider-aep - Terraform provider for AEP-compliant APIs
  • aepcli - Command-line interface for AEP-compliant APIs
  • aep-explorer - Interactive web UI for AEP-compliant APIs
  • aepc - Generates AEP-compliant RPCs from proto messages

Linting & Validation

AI

Community Tools

We welcome contributions from the community! This section showcases tools built by the AEP community that extend or complement the official tooling ecosystem.

  • aep-typespec - Reference implementation using TypeSpec to generate AEP-compliant OpenAPI Schema.

The following is a diagram that illustrates an end-to-end workflow, including nodes of tooling that exists, or is intended to be created for the project.

Some of the tools in the diagram are not maintained by the AEP project. The diagram is intended to be a complete representation of tools available to help a user understand how the tools fit into a development workflow.

tool

possible use case

user authored

generated

The service generation tooling looks like:

AEP Resource yaml

gRPC protobuf definition

OpenAPI Schema

GraphQL definitions

your proto service

HTTP REST APIs via grpc-gateway

api stubs via openapi-generator

your http service

While the client tooling for an AEP-compliant compatible API includes:

AEP-compliant REST API and OpenAPI definition

terraform provider for an AEP-compliant API

Language-specific libraries (e.g. via openapi-generator)

Asset inventory and policy management tooling (external integration)

Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions generator

API documentation generator (planned)