Nimbus: An In-Browser API Testing Playground for Laravel

Nimbus by Mazen Touati is a Laravel package that adds an in-browser API client to your application for inspecting and testing endpoints during development. Rather than switching to an external tool like Postman, Nimbus lives inside your Laravel project and automatically discovers your routes and validation rules.

Nimbus is NOT an API documentation generator like Swagger or Scribe. It doesn't produce customer-facing API documentation. Instead, it's a developer-focused API playground designed to improve your iteration speed while building and testing APIs.

Here's what it offers:

• Automatic route and validation discovery — Builds interactive request schemas from your FormRequest classes, Spatie Data objects, inline validation rules, or an OpenAPI specification
• Transaction mode — Wraps requests in a database transaction and rolls back automatically, so you can test destructive operations without affecting your data
• User impersonation — Act as different users by ID, bearer token, or basic auth to verify authorization policies across roles
• Shareable request states — Share endpoint configurations (URL, method, headers, payload) with teammates via links
• Value generators — Auto-populate request payloads with realistic test data that matches your validation rules
• dd() handling — Catches dd() output without breaking the UI

To get started, install the package and publish the assets:

composer require sunchayn/nimbus
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=nimbus-assets --tag=nimbus-config

Then visit /nimbus in your browser to start working with your defined API routes.

Check the GitHub repository for documentation and updates.