Manual and Automated API Testing with Python and Pytest

Modern backend architectures rely heavily on REST APIs, making API validation a critical skill for software quality assurance. Understanding both how to test APIs manually and how to automate those tests is essential for building robust, reliable software. This text-based course guides you from the absolute basics of HTTP requests to designing structured, automated API test suites. You will transition from manual API exploration to writing clean, maintainable Python code that automatically validates responses, handles authentication, and reports test results. What you'll learn: - Understand core API concepts, including HTTP methods, status codes, headers, and payload structures. - Perform manual API testing to explore endpoints and validate responses before writing automation scripts. - Automate HTTP requests using Python's Requests library to programmatically send GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests. - Write structured automated tests using the Pytest framework, leveraging modern Python type hints and fixtures for clean code. - Validate complex JSON payloads, handle authentication tokens, and manage dynamic test data. - Build a reusable, modular API testing framework from scratch with clean configuration management and virtual environments. You will start with fundamental API terminology and manual testing techniques before transitioning to Python scripting. As you progress, you will read through step-by-step code implementations and complete written exercises to build a robust testing framework. This course is designed for beginner QA engineers, manual testers looking to transition to automation, and developers wanting to learn backend testing. No prior programming or API testing experience is required. Start reading today to master manual and automated API testing with Python.