CI/CD Integration Guide

How to integrate API tests into your CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins.

GitHub Actions (Recommended)

See newman/github-actions.yml for a complete workflow that:

• Runs on every push to main/develop
• Runs on pull requests
• Runs on a schedule (every 6 hours)
• Supports manual triggers with environment selection
• Uploads HTML test reports as artifacts

Quick Setup

# 1. Copy the workflow file
mkdir -p .github/workflows
cp newman/github-actions.yml .github/workflows/api-tests.yml

# 2. Add secrets in GitHub Settings > Secrets > Actions
#    - API_BASE_URL
#    - API_TEST_EMAIL
#    - API_TEST_PASSWORD

# 3. Push and watch it run
git add .github/workflows/api-tests.yml
git commit -m "Add API test workflow"
git push

Pipeline Architecture

Code Push → Unit Tests → Integration Tests → Contract Tests → Deploy → Smoke Tests
              (pytest)     (Newman)            (Pact)          (CD)    (smoke_test.py)
                                                                         │
                                                                    Nightly ──→ Load Tests (k6)

Exit Codes

All tools follow Unix conventions:

• 0: All tests passed
• 1: Test failures detected
• 2: Configuration error

Your CI pipeline should fail the build on non-zero exit codes.

Running Newman in CI

# Basic run
newman run postman/collection.json -e postman/environment.json

# With environment variable overrides (for CI secrets)
newman run postman/collection.json \
  -e postman/environment.json \
  --env-var "base_url=$API_BASE_URL" \
  --env-var "test_email=$API_TEST_EMAIL" \
  --reporters cli,htmlextra \
  --bail

Running k6 in CI

# Install k6 (Ubuntu)
sudo gpg -k && sudo gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/k6-archive-keyring.gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys C5AD17C747E3415A3642D57D77C6C491D6AC1D68 && echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/k6-archive-keyring.gpg] https://dl.k6.io/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/k6.list && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install k6

# Run load test
k6 run k6/load-test.js --env BASE_URL=$API_BASE_URL

Part of API Developer Pro. Support: support@datanest.dev

Load Testing Guide with k6

How to use the included k6 scripts to understand your API's performance characteristics.

Test Types

Running Tests

# Standard load test
k6 run k6/load-test.js

# With custom base URL
k6 run --env BASE_URL=https://staging.example.com/v1 k6/load-test.js

# Output results to JSON for analysis
k6 run --out json=results.json k6/load-test.js

# Output to InfluxDB for Grafana dashboards
k6 run --out influxdb=http://localhost:8086/k6 k6/load-test.js

Reading k6 Results

     checks.........................: 95.23% 1904 out of 2000
     data_received..................: 12 MB  198 kB/s
     data_sent......................: 1.2 MB 20 kB/s
     http_req_duration..............: avg=142ms min=12ms med=98ms max=2.1s p(90)=312ms p(95)=489ms
     http_req_failed................: 2.15%  43 out of 2000
     iterations.....................: 2000   33.33/s

Key metrics to watch:

• p95 duration: 95% of requests complete within this time
• http_req_failed: Percentage of failed requests
• iterations/s: Throughput (requests per second)
• checks: Percentage of assertions that passed

Thresholds

Each test script defines thresholds that determine pass/fail:

thresholds: {
    http_req_duration: ['p(95)<500'],   // 95th percentile under 500ms
    http_req_failed: ['rate<0.05'],     // Less than 5% failure rate
}

If any threshold is breached, k6 exits with code 99 (threshold failure).

Performance Baselines

Before load testing, establish your baseline:

Part of API Developer Pro. Support: support@datanest.dev