Local playgrounds
Spin up the portal sandbox or Postman collection to explore endpoints with mocked credentials before promoting to production.
API testing guide
Ship confidently with recommended workflows, tooling, and automation tips purpose-built for SportsDatabase. Integrate the guide into your QA process to catch schema drift, performance regressions, and authentication issues before they reach production.
Continuous integration
Automate regression checks in CI using our official SDKs or simple curl smoke tests. Capture latency budgets and schema drift early.
Staging mirrors
Use staging API keys with production-like quotas to validate load tests, pagination logic, and webhook replay flows in isolation.
Preferred tooling
These integrations are maintained by SportsDatabase to ensure documentation parity and quick updates when endpoints evolve.
Postman workspace
Import our maintained Postman collection to browse every endpoint, preview sample payloads, and sync environment variables across your team.
Open Postman collectionVS Code REST Client
Leverage the REST Client extension with our included `.http` files for quick iterative testing directly from your IDE.
Download REST Client snippetsCLI scripts
Execute curl-based workflows with environment templating, response assertions, and structured JSON output via jq.
Browse CLI scriptsRecommended workflows
Blend manual verification and automation. The steps below reflect how our product and data engineering teams validate releases.
1. Configure environments
- Store API keys in secret managers or CI-provided vaults. Never commit secrets directly to repositories.
- Differentiate between staging and production keys. The portal issues a dedicated staging key for approved editors.
- Set `SPORTSDB_BASE_URL` and `SPORTSDB_API_KEY` environment variables for portable scripts.
2. Validate schema responses
- Use our generated TypeScript types or Zod schema package to assert response structure.
- Enable strict JSON parsing in tests to catch missing fields, unexpected nulls, or format changes.
- Capture representative fixtures to diff across deployments.
3. Exercise rate limits
- Introduce parallel requests in staging to ensure backoff logic works under burst windows.
- Assert 429 responses include `retry-after` headers and that your client honors the delay.
- Record latency metrics to compare against portal dashboards.
4. Verify webhooks & schedules
- Tunnel webhook deliveries to your local machine using Stripe CLI, ngrok, or Cloudflare Tunnels.
- Replay webhook payloads from the portal to confirm idempotency and signature validation.
- Document success/failure cases with reproducible cassettes for your QA team.
Telemetry & reporting
Feed results back into your observability stack. Export response times, success ratios, and anomaly notes to the portal so stewards can help triage regressions quickly.
Latency budgets
Track P95 latency against the live portal console metrics for parity.
Schema diffs
Alert when optional fields disappear or when new fields arrive unexpectedly.
Error taxonomy
Classify failures (4xx vs. 5xx) and escalate anomalies through portal support.
Frequently asked questions
- Where can I find mocked responses?
- The examples repository contains JSON fixtures for key endpoints. You can also capture live responses and sanitize them using our CLI utilities.
- Can I schedule automated tests?
- Yes. We recommend GitHub Actions or CircleCI nightly jobs that reuse the provided scripts and publish results to your observability stack.
- How do I report discrepancies?
- Open an issue from the portal dashboard or message the steward Discord channel. Include request IDs from the `x-request-id` header for faster tracing.