APIs are everywhere these days. As a VMware engineer with a broad range of products to support, APIs are ways to speed things up dramatically. Instead of clicking yourself silly, things can be done without seconds. Finding the documentation for all the different APIs can be challenging though, as there’s a PDF here, a knowledge base site there, etc.
Project Platypus is looking to change that by centralising VMware API documentation in a neat little container for ease of use. The presentation is handled by Swagger UI, which is pretty sleek. The project is hosted on GitHub and contributions (pull requests) are accepted. The current available list of APIs are as follows:
- NSX 6.2.
- vRealize Automation 7.0.
- vRealize Log Insight 3.3.
- vRealize Orchestrator 7.0.
- vRealize Operations 6.2.
This list is becoming larger by each contribution.
Platypus is originally designed to run as a Docker container on your laptop, so you can access the documentation from anywhere. How to run the container and use Platypus, there are a few posts already out there. This post is more for lazy people, like me. ;-)
Not wanting to start the container every time I need it and manually update it from GitHub, I decided to automate the update process and put the container somewhere I can access it everywhere (all, assuming I had internet) without having to start the container. This little project turned into vmwareapis.com.
This website is an up to date version of Platypus and updates from GitHub every morning at 06:00 CEST. You’ll see a ‘go get some coffee’ page when it’s updating.
Although it’s mostly for personal use, please let me know if you end up using it, would love to hear if it’s useful to you as well!