Overview

This guide will teach you about Microcks Snapshots and their use-case sweet spots. As an administrator, you will learn how to select the elements you would like to snapshot and how to import a previous Snapshot to restore content.

🚨 Prerequisites

Users can only be managed by Microcks admin, we mean people having the admin role assigned. In order to be able to retrieve the list of users and operate changes, the user should also have manage-users and manage-clients roles from realm-management Keycloak internal client. See Keycloak documentation for more on this point.

1. Use-cases

Microcks Snapshots are not complete database exports because they only integrate the Services & APIs definitions parts. As an example, they do not embed all the test runs and analytics data.

🚨 Warning

Snapshots are not a substitute for proper database backup and restore procedures! If you choose to deploy Microcks as a central instance that should always be up and running, database backups are necessary to keep all the history of different objects and retain the configuration of your instance.

Snapshots are lightweight structures that can be used to:

• easily exchange a set of Services & APIs definitions with another instance of Microcks,
• easily set up a new Microcks instance dedicated to mocking a functional subsystem - optionally with different configured response times for simulating a real behaviour,
• easily backup your instance if you do not want to lose test runs and analytics data

Snapshots can only be managed by Microcks administrator, we mean people with the administrator role assigned. If you need further information on how to manage users and roles, please check here. Snapshot management is simply a thumbnail with the Administration page that is available from the vertical menu on the left once logged in as an administrator.

2. Create a Snapshot

Snapshot management is simply a thumbnail of the Administration page, which is available from the vertical menu on the left once you are logged in as an administrator. Creating and exporting a new Snapshot is as simple as selecting the different API & Services you want to export by clicking the Export button on the top right. See the capture below:

💡 Be careful: the services list panel is scrollable and limited in height. If you have many services, you may not see some of them at first glance.

The export allows you to download a JSON file called microcks-repository.json that embeds the foundational elements of a repository:

{
  "services": [
    {
      "id": "5dd5661d7afe58688acc7eff",
      "name": "API Pastry",
      "version": "1.1.0",
      "xmlNS": null,
      "type": "REST",
      "metadata": {
        "createdOn": 1574266397964,
        "lastUpdate": 1584877046174,
        "annotations": null,
        "labels": {
          "domain": "pastry",
          "status": "GA"
        }
      },
      "operations": [
        [...]
      ]
    },
    [...]
  ],
  "resources": [...],
  "requests": [...],
  "responses": [...]
}

3. Restoring from Snasphot

The opposite import operation can be easily done by uploading your Snapshot file and hitting the Import button 😉

Wrap-up

Snapshots are lightweight structures that are really helpful to quickly share or reload API & Services definitions. They are very convenient to use, for example, when Developing with Testcontainers to ensure all your developers share the same third-party API definitions.

Keep in mind that Snapshots can also be exported and imported using Microcks REST API! 😉