32 posts tagged with "community"

A year has passed since our last update, and we have seen a lot of activity in the Pact ecosystem, with new features, improvements, and community contributions across the board. In this update, we will take a look at some of the highlights from the past year, including updates to our open source projects, community events, and more.

Pact & API Specifications​

The PactFlow team have been hard at work looking at how to improve our Bi-Directional workflow, in a few ways.

1. Closing the loop on BDCT provider verification, with a bespoke testing tool Drift, designed to be a cli-first, spec-driven testing tool, ensuring provider implementations are in line with API specifications, and providing detailed feedback on any discrepancies.
2. Improving the BDCT UI experience, with richer feedback on tested API specification endpoints, either via Drift for provider compliance, or against a pact file, for consumer compliance.
3. Improving the BDCT experience for API specifications
   1. Open source release of openapi-pact-comparator, a tool designed to compare OpenAPI specifications against Pact files, providing detailed feedback on any discrepancies, and helping teams ensure their API specifications are in line with their consumer contracts.
   2. Expanding the BDCT experience to support more API specification formats, such as AsyncAPI, ensuring teams can use BDCT regardless of their API specification format, especially in multi-protocol environments. This is being actively worked on, with support for AsyncAPI expected to be released in the coming months.

Pact & AI​

We've launched a set of AI tools to help you get the most out of Pact. These tools include both skills and agents that can assist you in various aspects of contract testing, from generating test cases to analyzing test results. You can find more information about these tools in our AI docs here.

Agent skills teach your AI coding assistant — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, and others — how to work with Pact, PactFlow, and Drift. Instead of explaining contract testing concepts every time you start a conversation, the skills give your AI persistent, deep knowledge of consumer test patterns, provider verification, can-i-deploy diagnostics, Drift test authoring, and workspace management.

Big thanks for Kevin Raz, who has been leading the charge on this front, and has done an amazing job in getting these tools out into the wild. We are excited to see how the community will use these tools to enhance their contract testing workflows.

Please be sure to share your feedback on these tools, as we are always looking for ways to improve and make them more useful for our users.

Pact OSS Updates​

Pact-JS​

Pact-JS has seen Pact V4 become the default interface, introducing a new GraphQL wrapper, and several improvements to the API, including better support for asynchronous interactions, improved error handling, and more. We have also seen a lot of community contributions to the project, with new features and improvements being added regularly.

Be sure to checkout the changelog

Pact JS CLI saw an update to utilise the new unified Pact CLI, which provides a unified interface for all of our rust based CLI tools, including the Pact Broker CLI.

Pact-JS - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-js

Pact-JVM​

Pact-JVM 4.7 has just come out of beta, with lots of new changes, so be sure to update. Ron has been experimenting with Claude Code, so if you have any feature requests or feedback on how to improve the Pact-JVM experience, be sure to let him know.

Pact-JVM - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-jvm

Pact-Python​

Pact Python V3 was released in December, which brings another implementation into line with the Pact Rust core, and allows for usage of Pact V3 and V4 features, as well as introducing the pact plugin ecosystem. To find out more about the road to V3, check out the blog post.

Are you using Pact Python? We would love to hear about your experience, and any feedback you have on the new release. We are always looking for ways to improve the library, and your feedback is invaluable in helping us do that.

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

Pact-PHP is going from strength to strength with v10.2.0 in January, which includes a lot of improvements and bug fixes.

v11.x is now in beta, which will default created pact files, to V4 as well as updating the underlying Pact Rust core.

Be sure to check it out if you are a PHP user, and as usual don't forget to share your feedback, as we are always looking for ways to improve the library and make it more useful for our users.

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Pact-Go​

Pact-Go has been ticking along with a maintainence release to support the latest go version and updates to the underlying Pact Rust core. Stan dropped us a new feature to improve distinguishing failures in the verification flow, separating Pact verification failures from other types of errors, such as network issues or misconfigurations, which should help improve the DX when working with Pact-Go.

Pact-Go - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-go.

Pact-Reference​

Tien introduced a new XML generator as part of this RFC which was introduced in the pact-rust core, which itself as been updated to utilised the rewritten pact mock server v2. This trickled down in the FFI library in v0.5.0.

Several CLI improvements have been made

• Verifier CLI now includes --exit-first and --last-failed options to improve the feedback loop when working with large test suites, allowing you to exit on the first failure, or to re-run only the tests that failed in the previous run, which should help improve the DX when working with the Verifier CLI. --html <PATH> or --xslt <PATH> options, introduce the ability generate rich HTML verification reports from the CLI. The report is generated by first producing an XML report and then transforming it via XSLT into a styled, print-friendly HTML page.
• Pact stub server now contains a watch mode, which allows you to automatically restart the server when changes are made to the pact file, which should help improve the DX when working with the Pact stub server. See this PR for details

Pact-Reference - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-rust.

Pact Broker​

The Pact Broker has seen a lot of improvements over the past year, with new features and improvements being added regularly. We have also seen a lot of community contributions to the project, with new features and improvements being added regularly.

• The ability to render async/sync messages and mixed v4 pacts in the UI, which is a big step towards supporting the full range of Pact features in the UI.
• More API endpoints to support
  • provider pacts by consumer branch
  • provider states by branch or environment
• Lots of smaller bug fixes and optimisations to improve the overall performance and reliability of the Pact Broker.

Big thanks to our contributors Dimitris Dranidis & Ludovic Tourman and all of the PactFlow engineers working on the codebase.

Pact-Broker - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-broker.

Pact-Net​

We've seen a couple of PR's to introduce the pact-plugin ecosystem into Pact-Net, with synchronous messages being the first target, to support gRPC.

Massive thanks to Max Lancaster

• Add Synchronous Plugin Interaction Support
• Add PactNet.Extensions.Grpc package for grpc plugin support

Be sure to take a look at them and provide feedback if you are a .NET user, as we know you are wanting gRPC support, and this is the first step towards that goal.

Pact-Net - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-net.

Pact-Ruby​

Pact Ruby v2 has been released which utilises the latest shared Pact Rust core, which allows for usage of Pact V3 and V4 features, as well as introducing the pact plugin ecosystem.

This means that the previous ruby based ecosystem is legacy mode, with Pact-Ruby v2 joining the Rust FFI Consumers ecosystem

Additionally the Pact Broker Client has been rewritten in Rust, as the Pact Broker CLI, and to further improve the DX, we have rolled all of the rust based CLI's into a single tool, called Pact CLI, which provides a unified interface for all of our rust based CLI tools.

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

Community Projects​

• Murat Ozcan has been working with AI, and Pact in the open, check out his video of setting up Pact-JS with BMad's test architect and read more below about his endeavours in his own words.

We just open-sourced a library we've been using internally at SEON for Pact.js contract testing,  thought it might be useful for others here.

Pact is powerful but the setup boilerplate adds up fast. Every team ends up writing the same plumbing. The library extracts those patterns into composable utilities.

What's in it:

• createProviderState / toJsonMap
  • typed provider state params without the JsonMap conversion headache
• buildVerifierOptions / buildMessageVerifierOptions
  • one call to build complete VerifierOptions for HTTP and message verification
• createRequestFilter
  • injects auth headers into verification requests without the Express type gymnastics
• handlePactBrokerUrlAndSelectors
  • reads env vars and assembles the right consumer version selector strategy automatically
• github: https://github.com/seontechnologies/pactjs-utils
• npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@seontechnologies/pactjs-utils
• docs: https://seontechnologies.github.io/pactjs-utils/

The repo also functions as an educational resource, dogfooding the lib, and showcasing vanilla vs lib versions of the same tests.

P.S. For those moving toward agentic QA: BMad Test Architect now has a pactjs-utils installation option. It’s designed to create and self-heal contract tests using these patterns out of the box. https://bmad-code-org.github.io/bmad-method-test-architecture-enterprise/

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 6k other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf

It's May and we are back with another update of all things Pact.

We've had a bit of a sabbatical from writing blog posts over the last couple of months, but not to fear, I am back with lots of goodies to share, including completed RFC's, community contributions a plenty and some tooling enhancements to make your contract testing lives easier.

Pact & AI​

I have been quite quiet on the AI front, which is unlike me for several reasons, not least that I studied Artificial Intelligence & Cybernetics at university.

We had several requests through our dayjob at SmartBear & PactFlow to improve on the current state of the AI offerings, especially with regards to how they handle the generation of Pact tests which relate to your codebase, use recommended guidelines from the Pact team as to how best structure the tests, and ideally be scaffolded from the same templates in your codebase to ensure consistency.

For those of you reading, who happen to be PactFlow customers, you may have already seen or be using the AI Augmented contract testing feature, which is part of SmartBear's API Hub.

If you haven't be sure to checkout the website, or the docs.

In a nutshell

PactFlow AI includes a suite of features to improve the efficiency and quality of your contract tests:

• Generating Pact tests using various combinations of OpenAPI descriptions, code, or request-response pairs
• Customizable prompts and test templates to tailor output to your specific needs
• Seamless integration with PactFlow's Role-based Access Controls feature, enabling you to enforce and manage organizational policies
• Code review (upcoming), enabling you to evaluate the quality of existing Pact tests and suggest best-practice improvements

PactFlow AI is available as a CLI and supports the following programming languages:

• Java and Kotlin
• TypeScript / JavaScript
• .NET
• Golang
• PHP
• Swift
• Python (coming soon)

This is all part of a larger offering from SmartBears HaloAI product which is permeating all aspects of the tooling we built, to support you throughout your SDLC, whether you are at the design stage, transferring human ideas, to OpenAPI descriptions, or enabling rapid API and UI testing tooling with minimal maintaining effort, affording you time to ensure you are building the right thing, right.

Pact OSS Updates​

Pact RFCs​

XML Generators are here, as Tien Vo's RFC and associated changes were merged into their respective repos.

Keep an eye out for the examples in pact-php, coming soon. See below links to details, to follow along, or help provide a review.

• rfc: Implement generators for XML text and attribute
  • feat: Implement generators for XML pact-reference
  • feat: Use new XML generator pact-reference
  • chore: Add example for xml generators pact-php

If you have a change you want to see in the Pact Foundation, why not drop us a shout, or compile your first RFC.

Pact-JS​

Pulak Deyashi has been on a roll, dropping in some fixes around example values in V3 date/time matchers, in this PR, he followed it up with additional tests in the pact core, which is much appreciated.

He also dropped in a small typo change in our pact-js-cli repo.

All contributions are welcomed, small or big, like this one, from Val Kolovos introducing Async messages in the V4 Pact format to Pact-JS

• feat: V4 Asynchronous Messages (issue #1186)

Pact-JS - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-js

Pact-JVM​

Ruud Welling dropped a fix in to ensure provider state is injected when verifying sync message pacts.

Pact-JVM - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-jvm

Pact-Python​

Josh Ellis introduced changes to the handling of functional arguments to be much more flexible, allowing for default arguments. You can see the PR for more information here

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

Tien has been working on some QoL improvements which have now been merged.

• chore(deps): Update stub server for better performance
• docs: Add common issues related to loadding ffi to troubleshooting document
• refactor: Replace roadrunner by php's gRPC server

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Pact-Go​

Pact-Go v2.4.1 has been released, which includes the latest pact ffi core library, and also mandates the minimum go version to be 1.23, as we are following Go's eol schedule

Pact-Go - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-go.

Pact-Reference​

Tien delivered the following changes to bring XML generators to Pact.

• feat: Implement generators for XML pact-reference
• feat: Use new XML generator pact-reference

Pact-Reference - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-rust.

Pact-Stub-Server​

• Stefan Ansing improved the performance of the pact-stub-server by optimising the memory allocations in this PR
• Ron also ensured the insecure_tls flag works correctly when fetching pacts from a Pact Broker which addresses this issue, however it is worth noting that the recommended method is you make your certificates available to your Pact Broker and client libraries/tooling.

Pact Broker​

The Broker saw a fair few features delivered over the last few months

• feat: add deployed-environments to pacticipant response and tag versions
• feat: show deployed-environments in branch versions response
• feat: add tag_versions endpoint
• feat: added deployed-environments to /pacticipants/$name/versions and /pacticipants/$name
• feat: aggregate provider states by consumers
• chore(ci): test maintained version of postgres
• fix: refactored the query to filter out duplicate integration rows

We also had one just land today, to allow for the schema configuration to be changed from its current public schema, which according to release notes, is not recommend in postgres 15+

• chore: Allow schema configuration which addresses a request to Add Support for Specifying Database Schema via Environment Variable.

Pact-Broker - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-broker.

Pact-Net​

Adam Rodgers has two draft PR's in play, why not help him out by dropping in for a review.

• feat!: Make the messaging provider handle scenario requests async
• feat!: Invoke async message scenario factories on request

Levan Nozadze has also dropped in a pull request, to close down a highly requested feature

• feat(verifier): Added support of set_no_pacts_is_error feature

Pact-Net - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-net.

Pact-Ruby​

Renaud Martinet was having some issues with cross-compat testing with Pact-JVM with release v1.66.0 of pact-ruby.

Check out his expert troubleshooting and reproduction, and if you want to add a review, it would be most welcome.

• Fix expected body when using generators

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

APIDays New York - 2025​

I delivered a talk at APIDays New York titled Graceful service evolution, driven by open standards, guided by contracts. I'll add a video link when it gets published :)

A look at contract testing over the ages, as a means for graceful service evolution, and how it neatly intersects with the exponential explosion of use of API’s and uptake of OpenAPI as a defining standard. We will explore what a single source of truth looks like, and how perspectives change depending on your viewpoint. We’ll learning how to tackle challenges, such as versioning, managing breaking changes, provider drift (spec out of sync with implementation), consumer drift ( a view of the used surface area of your API ), helping you combat Hyrum’s law and provide you real world ways to build API’s now with leading open source tools such as Spectral, Pact & Swagger that will last well into the future.

Community Projects​

We saw Fernando Teixeira bring two things to our attention. I'll let him explain why, and then provide you links to the goodness.

I have been working with Pact for some years, and I noticed that many people still don't understand why they need it. That's why I wanted to have a presentation that focused more on the 'Why' and discuss in more details some of the challenges that it helps to solve.

• A talk presented at TestWarez last year, in which Fernando explains some of the challenges that Pact wants to solve in terms of microservices testing.
  • Check it out at TestWarez - Mastering Microservices Testing with an Effective Testing Strategy
• An Ecommerce Microservices Testing Example designed to explore QA strategies for microservices with Synchronous and Asynchronous communication. Includes examples of message-based and HTTP contracts.

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 6k other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf

Hope you enjoyed our shortest month of the year, so short that I didn't manage to get my February blog post out until the first week of March! Whoops. Anyway, I'm pleased as the sun is shining, we've had some decent progress in the Pact ecosystem and we've had some surprises start arriving on contributors doorsteps. So let's not waste time and get straight into your monthly Pact updates.

Pact OSS Updates​

Pact RFCs​

We have an open RFC, that we would love input on, please take a look if you have time.

• rfc: Implement generators for XML text and attribute
  • feat: Implement generators for XML pact-reference
  • feat: Use new XML generator pact-reference
  • chore: Add example for xml generators pact-php

Pact-JS​

pact-js v14 has been released, this now includes the libpact_ffi & pact-js-core node bindings published as separate npm packages.

You'll benefit from smaller package downloads (the benefits of which will depend on your packager) with all the previous benefits of prebuilt node bindings on your machine, eliminating the need for post install steps and a full compiler set (gcc or msvc toolchain).

these are segmented by ${os}-{arch}-{libc}

users should not need to require these automatically, npm should determine the required optional dependency to download at install time.

supported_platforms

"@pact-foundation/pact-core-darwin-arm64": "16.0.0", "@pact-foundation/pact-core-darwin-x64": "16.0.0", "@pact-foundation/pact-core-linux-arm64-glibc": "16.0.0", "@pact-foundation/pact-core-linux-arm64-musl": "16.0.0", "@pact-foundation/pact-core-linux-x64-glibc": "16.0.0", "@pact-foundation/pact-core-linux-x64-musl": "16.0.0", "@pact-foundation/pact-core-windows-x64": "16.0.0"

Pact-JS - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-js

Pact-Python​

Hope you've tried the Pact Python V3 interface.

Some of our users have been, and in doing so strike up the potential for new feature enhancements and improvements like this one.

• Async state and message handler

If not, why not try it out today?

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

See the RFC section above, to find out how Tien is trying to introduce XML generators to the Pact core.

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Pact-Go​

pact-go v2.3.0 has been released.

It contains a change to support the correct reporting of the pact-go client library version, during contract creation and verification. This has been paired with a Pact Broker change, to support display of the verifier tool detail.

We've will again be dropping the minimum version of golang, to 1.23, in this PR

Pact-Go - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-go.

Pact-Reference​

Don't forgot to check out some of the latest proposals for the Pact-Plugin framework

Pact-Reference - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-rust.

Pact Broker​

Rack 3 upgrade is complete​

We've now completed the Rack 3 upgrade work, which allows us to upgrade some existing dependencies and close off a CVE.

You can find it in v2.113.2 or later

Provider State Discovery endpoint​

One of the biggest challenges with contract-testing at scale, is the discoverability of provider states, in the broker, for any particular provider.

We now have a new resource that returns a aggregated de-duplicated list of all provider states for a given provider, released as v2.113.0 as part of https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact_broker/pull/734.

How do I use it?​

Make a GET request to /pacts/provider/{provider}/provider-states

This resource returns a aggregated de-duplicated list of all provider states for a given provider.

• Provider states are collected from the latest pact on the main branch for any dependant consumers.
• Params will be shown, if provided in the provider state.

Example Response

{
  "providerStates": [
    {
      "name": "an error occurs retrieving an alligator"
    },
    {
      "name": "there is an alligator named Mary"
    },
    {
      "name": "there is not an alligator named Mary"
    }
  ]
}

Extended Verification Results​

The new Pact Core written in Rust supports publishing information about the client language that executed the Pact verification code, however this information wasn't stored in the Pact Broker, which mean users of the Pact Core, across multiple client language implementations couldn't distinguish which client framework, and client framework version was used.

This has now been resolved in this PR and released as v2.114.0

An example payload to the verification endpoint would look as pew below

{
  "providerApplicationVersion": "1",
  "success": true,
  "buildUrl": "http://build-url",
  "testResults": [],
  "verifiedBy": {
    "implementation": "Pact-Rust",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "clientLanguage": {
      "testFramework": "TEST",
      "name": "TESTER",
      "version": "1.2.3"
    }
  }
}

and you will be able to view this in your HAL Browser, or via an API call

Pact-Broker - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-broker.

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

Pact Nirvana​

The North Star of Pact implementations, Pact Nirvana is an awesome place to be.

So much so, that Ben Brugman and Ashley Gautama reached out and said not only had they reached Pact Nirvana, but wanted to celebrate with some Pact swag.

Jo Laing and myself put our creative heads together, and as the first packages have begun to arrive, we can now share what we created with you all.

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 6k other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf

👋 Wahey, it's 2025, it's the end of January and you've tuned in to another Pact blog. We'll take a look at what's been happening in the Pact ecosystem this month, as well as how you can get involved in shaping Pact's roadmap for the next year. We can't do it alone, and we would love to bring in more contributors and maintainers this year. Hopefully you'll be one of them :)

We'll also keep you posted on the updates from the PactFlow team, as they deliver new features for the commercial product, which brings net benefits to the open-source project, and some of the work our PactFlow engineers are doing across the open-source ecosystem.

Pact OSS Updates​

Linux ARM64 Runners now available for open-source​

GitHub announced Linux ARM64 runners available in public preview, which means we can natively run our arm64 builds, eliminating the need for qemu, and actually providing better speeds / efficiency than their x86_64 counterparts.

We've started rolling them out around our different repos. If you spot one that could benefit, why not drop in a PR. Same goes for your other favourite open-source projects.

Pact 2025 Roadmap Planning​

We are looking at 2024 in a retro, and getting together async to think about the future of Pact, and what our roadmap and priorities look like for the year. We've introduced multiple ways for collaborators to get involved, including bi-weekly maintainers meetings.

If you want to check out the discussion, and get involved, why not check out the issue, and drop us a line

Pact RFCs​

Pact-Plugins​

Ali Ustek dropped in a PR to avoid us relying on a popular, but now unmaintained dependency.

Pact-Plugins - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-plugins.

Pact-JS​

Following on from pact-js-cli and its split platform/architecture npm packages, the same has now been applied to pact-js-core in this PR.

It's awaiting review, but I've been tested it out against npm, yarn, yarn pnp and pnpm, and it's pretty solid. You'll benefit from smaller package downloads (the benefits of which will depending on your packager) with all the previous benefits of prebuilt node bindings on your machine, eliminating the need for post install steps and a full compiler set (gcc or msvc toolchain).

Pact-JS - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-js

Pact-Python​

Just before the new year turned, Josh dropped the release of Pact Python version 2.3.0. Among the many incremental improvements, the most significant is the support of functional arguments, the ability to map functions to provider states and message descriptions, without the user needing to spin up a separate proxy, or endpoints on their application. This feature provides an improved user experience for providers, and also introduces several breaking changes to the pact.v3 preview.

Read about it here

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

Continuing from Tiens RFC for adding matching rules for form/urlencoded bodies, he has completed the implementation and added the examples to pact-php, rounding off work started this time last year.

Great work chap! We really hope you've enjoyed using pact-php v10. We've loved hearing your feedback about the migration, and the benefits you've seen after using it.

If you haven't yet, what are you waiting for?

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Pact-Go​

Alpine Linux support is now here, despite segfaults during the verification process. We would appreciate any extra eyes, if this feature would be useful to you. you can track my progress here

We've also had to drop the minimum version of golang, to 1.22, in this PR

You can grab these changes in pact-go v2.2.0

Pact-Go - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-go.

Pact-Reference​

Marko Justinek aka @surpher, Pact Swift's author, has been working on his library again, and found a few issues when migrating it to the latest version of pact_ffi.

• Matchers: Using time matcher in a query parameter failing verification
• Matchers: Numeric matcher passing test sending String value
• Matchers: Include matcher in query parameters failing to match

These actually weeded out some regressions, which Ron has now fixed. Have you spotted something, let us know?

Pact-Reference - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-rust.

Pact Broker​

We've been pleased to hire a few new members to the PactFlow team over the last year, who you may have seen beginning to drop in pull requests and tweaks to the Pact Broker repo.

• Steven Holloway / @impurist
• Phanindra Srungavarapu / @pahnin
• Sauparna Gupta / @Saup21

We'll be introducing our engineers in our posts, over the year, and I can't wait for you to meet them!

Most Ruby applications, have migrated to use Rack 3.x now, however the Pact-Broker has been impeded due to one of its dependencies. This leaves us with an open CVE in the Sinatra library. Ron has been working on this by way of a custom adapter. You can track it here

One of the biggest challenges with contract-testing at scale, is the discoverability of provider states, in the broker, for any particular provider. I've dropped a PR in, which will be reviewed by the team. It will create a new resource that returns a aggregated de-duplicated list of all provider states for a given provider.

Whilst I think there is lots of room for improvement, which we can discuss another time, I think it provides a good start. Why not test it out and let me know your feedback.

Pact-Broker - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-broker.

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 6k other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf

Pact Almanac 2024​

Grab your hoverboard, and get prepared for another trip back to the future, with our round up of this years Pactivities in our seasonal Pact Almanac.

This year we've seen the migration to the Pact Rust core, featuring V4 spec good including combined interactions and plugins, begin to take fruition in most of the major client libraries, and improvements and consistencies across of tooling, documentation and examples. We know there is much more to do, as always, and we've been pleased to see an increasing amount of contributions, across a wide array of repositories in the pact-foundation. We've seen an RFC process created, to help democratise large scale decisions which affect the Pact eco-system, and I would invite you all to get involved in some way, shape or form.

If you haven't read our monthly blog posts, you can read a round-up of the most significant changes from each month in there. Check out the side-bar to the left to view the older posts.

I've mainly focused on community heroes this time round, where you can find multiple advocates of Pact, spreading the word of not just how to do contract testing, but the why. You'll hear about the worlds first dedicated book to contract-testing. I hope you'll enjoy them, be sure to like and comment on the videos, whether it's to show your appreciation or you just fancy a debate.

I'll also pull out a stand-out change from each month either by the team or one of our many contributors.

Anyhow, let see what each month has in store for us.

Jan​

🧑‍💻 Tien Vo started by year by continuing and productionising the migration of Pact-PHP over to the Rust core. We saw the first community created pact_compatibility_suite examples land this month, and Tien has worked diligently all year, in implementing not only new features to Pact-PHP, but contributions to the Pact ecosystem as a whole, from an RFC for form-urlencoded matching ability, to several changes in the Pact-Rust core and Pact-Plugin ecosystem. It has seen great feedback from users, including Steve Taylor.

Not an issue as such, just want to say I love it. (I'm using 10-alpha3)

It's so much faster and simpler, and I'm looking forward to using some of the newer Pact specification features.

My API tests came across easily without much fuss.

Pact-PHP v10, was made generally available in September, in this release.

Well done Tien! Your hard work has paid off and is very much appreciated by the community.

Feb​

• 🧑‍💻 February saw more libraries progress towards the Rust core and Pact V4 Spec goodness.
  • Pact-Net v5 Beta was released for V4 Pact compat support and mixed interactions
  • Pact-JS v12.2.0 GA'd the PactV4 interface for plugin support
  • Pact-Python's v3 interface was progressing with another implementation of the pact_compatibility_suite.
• 🧑‍💻 A plan was set out to provide better platform support for Linux, in terms of distro compatibility, musl and arm64.
  • Yo dawg, I heard you like Alpine
  • You and whose ARMy?

Community hero of the month: Stanislav Vodetskyi for all the improvements in the Pact-Go project, and learning Rust on the fly to aid himself and the Pact community by proxy.

Mar​

• 🧑‍💻 Multi-arch images were finally produced for Docker, enabling arm64 users on Linux, or most likely with new Apple silicon based Macs
  • pact rust core projects
    • pact-ref-verifier
    • pact-ref-mock-server
    • pact-stub-server
  • pact-broker
  • pact-cli

Community hero of the month: Dany Marques for his tenacity in tracking down an obscure bug in the npm ecosystem, and creating upstream fixes, as well as resolving his issue in the interim in the pact-js project.

Apr​

• 🧑‍💻 Josh Ellis was thrilled to announce the release of Pact Python v2.2, a significant milestone that not only improves upon the existing features but also offers an exclusive preview into the future of contract testing with Python. He posted about it over at pact-pythons new doc site, in its inaugural blog post from maintainer Josh Ellis.

We've often wondered when a book dedicated to contract testing would appear on the scene. We even had this statement on the books section of our site

We're not aware of any books currently dedicated to contract testing, but here are some that talk about Pact and contract testing as part of a broader microservices development and testing strategy

However good news everybody 🎺 the first one was announced back in April.

Community hero(es) of the month: Marie Cruz and Lewis Prescott, for being awesome but also releasing Contract Testing in Action 📕 under the MEAP (Manning Early Access Program), the first book dedicated to contract testing.

May​

• 🧑‍💻 Alpine was finally supported for CLI's and the FFI shared library, and alongside it, changes were made to reduce the size of the Pact libraries, so whilst I began to add Alpine support into the client libraries, existing users got the benefits of quicker downloads. You can read about it here
• 🧑‍💻 Ron started a redesign/rewrite for a V2 version of the Pact Reference Mock Server

Community hero of the month: Praveen Erode Mohanasundaram - A Long time Pact advocate and community contributor who spoke at Devoxx UK about Contract Testing: The Key to Unlocking E2E Testing Bottlenecks in CI/CD pipeline, you can catch the video on YouTube 📺

June​

• 🧑‍💻 The Pact reference project saw the closure of a couple of long-standing issues which affected cross-platform compatibility and repeated test runs, these unblocked the Pact-Net V5 released, and drove additional changes in Pact-JS. Read more here
• 🧑‍💻 Pact-JS saw the splitting of the ruby cli, from the main package, and the birth of the new @pact-foundation/pact-cli package. This meant we could deliver native Alpine support to the Pact JS project, including the shared libraries in the project, and due to the package size reductions, the resultant package which contained a pre-built binary for every supported platforms, is now smaller than previously, despite the addition of musl x86_64/arm64 shared libs.

Community hero of the month: Mark Bradley who announced he would be speaking GopherConUK 2024 in August. He his topic will be "Using Pact to deploy Microservice with confidence". He has previously posted videos and guides on how to get started with Pact in PHP and Go.

July​

As you may be aware, there are multiple places where one can get help or request changes to the Pact ecosystem, either across the whole ecosystem, or for an individual repositories. Canny, our public roadmap, GitHub project boards on individual repositories, Slack to name a few.

Some of Pact's maintainers also work together, and as such conversations, discussions and agreements can be made but not consistently communicated, leaving users, for example who don't frequent Slack, or one of our maintainer sessions, to feel excluded from conversations.

As such we decided to deprecate our Canny roadmap and have migrated the issues to GitHub, in our Roadmap repo, to keep issues close to where the code is.

To try and counter some of the concerns around the decision-making process, we felt a RFC (Request for comments) process would be beneficial to allow for a record of proposed changes and decisions, and provide a central place to users, contributors and maintainers to go.

• You can read about the accepted process here

You can get involved via GitHub, but we also catch once every two weeks in our Maintainer meets.

• 10am-10:45am UTC (11am GMT / 8pm AEST)

You can download a calender invite from our repo

A google document holds our agenda which is openly editable and where anyone can table ideas for discussion.

• 🧑‍💻 Pact Mock Server v2.0 is here \o/

We mentioned in April, that Ron was redesigning Pact Mock Server, as the existing mock server implementation was written in 2017-2019, and contained some esoteric TLS code that was more complex to upgrade to Hyper 1.0 than to rewrite it using newer Hyper 1.0 constructs.

Upgrading to Hyper 1.0 also brought us the following benefits:

• Supports both HTTP 1 and 2 with the same server implementation
• Supports protocol upgrades (leading to supporting things like Web Sockets)
• Middleware support
• No more need for the custom TLS code

Check out the release log to find out what went into the rewrite, and watch out for the updated mock server making it's way through the Pact ecosystem shortly.

• 🧑‍💻 It's been nearly 2 years since we introduce the Pact Plugin framework to the world.

We've seen 2 plugins created by Pact maintainers (pact-protobuf-plugin, pact-csv-plugin), 2 created by non-maintainers (pact-avro-plugin, in-house json-rpc plugin) and provided a course to guide you on how to build your own plugin (pact-matt-plugin).

We know there are some rough edges, and we have been mulling over what the future of Pact-Plugins could look like. We want to start gathering feedback from users, maintainers and plugin authors, even if you tried it out and got stuck. We will see an RFC (request for comments) ticket being raised in the Roadmap soon and we would like to hold some group sessions to discuss, where participants will get to earn some swag for their time, as well as the satisfaction of being able to shape Pact Plugins destiny, whatever that may be!

Community hero of the month: Val Kolovos for continuing adding features to pact-python's v3 interface with the rust core, such as async messaging and matchers. Read about it here

Aug​

• 🧑‍💻 The RFC process is approved. Bring on the changes.
• 🧑‍💻 Bas Djistrka from OnTestAutomation launched a new course, Practical contract testing with Pact
• 🧑‍💻 Pact compatibility suite, I've mentioned it a couple of times, so what actually is it?

A Set of BDD style tests to check compatibility between Pact implementations has been created in the pact-compatibility-suite

Current examples

• pact-rust
• pact-jvm
• pact-php
• pact-python
• pact-ruby-ffi

In order to validate pact-go, pact-js & pact-ruby and it's adherence to the pact-specification, it would be good to begin to implement the following tickets.

• Verify Pact-Go against pact-compatibility-suite
• Verify Pact-JS against pact-compatibility-suite
• Verify Pact-Ruby against pact-compatibility-suite

Anyone is welcome to start implementing these, we are beginning to see contributors to pact-pythons v3/v4 implementation, so why not join in?

Community hero of the month: Augusto Colombelli for his blog post Contract Tests — APIs Guided by Consumers, which you can read over on Medium here.

Sept​

• 🧑‍💻 We saw our first two RFC's raised. Sweet!
  • rfc: configuration and shared files proposed by @JP-Ellis
  • rfc: Define matching rules for form-urlencoded body by @tienvx
• 🧑‍💻 Ruby was not to be left out from the Pact Rust core, goodness. my pact-ffi ruby wrapper gem saw its first real world user. Read about it in more detail here

Community hero of the month: Murat K Ozcan has recently been taking an adventure in the world of Pact, after picking up Marie & Lewis' Contract testing in Action book. He has written 3 posts which are well worth a read.

Oct​

• 🧑‍💻 Pact-Net V5 is launched! Read about it here
• 🧑‍💻 A suite of message pact workshops were created to help users get started. See it here
• 🎉 Pact Slack now has over 6 thousand members!

We were really proud to say we have just crossed the 6k mark, with 6005 members in our general channel in Pact Slack.

We appreciate many users journeys through Slack are transient, either whilst they are getting started with the Pact ecosystem, or after some help, and encounters may be all but fleeting. It is worth noting that not an insignificant amount of us have had the good fortune of meeting new friends, both in person, and virtually, making professional relationships and providing springboards to new opportunities. Some of the interactions have had positive life-changing impacts, your authors journey included.

We are proud to be able to foster a safe environment, where people are welcome to discuss contract testing with a captive audience, and for every engineer who finds that eureka moment where contract testing, just clicks, we know it is improving the API delivery landscape massively and has a net benefit to many interactions we have in our day-to-day life with systems.

If you are proud about the positive impacts Pact has had in your place of work, why not share it with the world? We can provide you a platform, and sharing your engineering mistakes and successes, is a great way to build transparency and trust with your customers, and promote a healthy learning based culture in your organisation.

Community hero of the month: Lewis Prescott for taking to the stage at CypressConf to teach users about the fundamentals of contract testing as well as how to implement consumer-driven contract testing with Cypress + Pactflow.

Nov​

• 🧑‍💻 We've saw a few improvements in the pact-ruby project
  • V3 & V4 Generators thanks to Steve Taylor
  • Pact-provider-verifier now works with Rack 3, after we decided to fork rack-reverse-proxy in order to provide backwards compat with Rack 2 but allow for forwards compat with Rack 3+
  • Tweaks to Pact contract generation and verification, after ruby json 2.8.0 changes the way that JSON.pretty_generate renders empty collections such as arrays or objects. This allowed us to ensure that contracts generated with pre and post json 2.8.x behave in the same way.

I mentioned back in August, about the sbmt-pact project, which afforded users the ability to leverage the Pact V3 & V4 specification in Ruby.

I've spent a bit of time with the project, to see what changes I would need to make, to allow the functionality to slot into Pact-Ruby and allow for the minimum changeset, for existing pact-ruby users. I'm pleased to say that I've got pretty far and have documented in this issue TODO: link to sbmt-pact issue.

I've tested this out in real-world Ruby projects.

• Pact-Broker:
  • sbmt-pact can verify existing v2 pacts generated by the Pact-Ruby core, and v2/v3/v4 pacts generated by the Pact-Rust core.
• Pact_Broker-client
  • sbmt-pact can create v2/v3/v4 pacts

Community hero of the month: Ben Brugman & Ashley Gautama - For reaching Pact Nirvana, at their organisation, across many many teams. Read his celebratory post here

Dec​

• 🧑‍💻 A set of new proposals for discussion in the Pact Plugin ecosystem. Wondering what plugins are? Read the quick start

Community hero of the month: Ruth - A long time pact-jvm user, Ruth has been in contact with the team over several issues in her Pact setup, and has provided some of the best reproducible examples I've come across. Glad to see Pact doing so well for you in your organisation, maybe next year we can get you to do a guest blog post. No pressure, but that also applies to my readers. It could be you here, in our wrap up for 2025!

See you next year folks​

Thanks for everyone's efforts in using, promoting, and preaching about Pact to everyone you know, now its our time to repay the favour.

If you've done something great, and want to share it, get it listed - the site is open source and you can edit any page, we want to give you a platform to help amplify your voice!

Maybe there is time to get one last video/blog or PR in before crimbo! No, only joking, that’s a wrap for this year's Pact Open Source Almanac, pop your feet up, enjoy your puds and hope to see your name in the book next year.

🕸️ Welcome to the October Pact Blog - hope you've got your 🎃 ready for carving, but for now, sit back and relax as we take you through all the updates in the Pact ecosystem along with events & material you've been sharing across the web this month.

Pact OSS Updates​

Pact Slack now has over 6 thousand members​

We are really proud to say we have just crossed the 6k mark, with 6005 members in our general channel in Pact Slack.

We appreciate many users journeys through Slack are transient, either whilst they are getting started with the Pact ecosystem, or after some help, and encounters may be all but fleeting. It is worth noting that not an insignificant amount of us have had the good fortune of meeting new friends, both in person, and virtually, making professional relationships and providing springboards to new opportunities. Some of the interactions have had positive life-changing impacts, your authors journey included.

We are proud to be able to foster a safe environment, where people are welcome to discuss contract testing with a captive audience, and for every engineer who finds that eureka moment where contract testing, just clicks, we know it is improving the API delivery landscape massively and has a net benefit to many interactions we have in our day-to-day life with systems.

If you are proud about the positive impacts Pact has had in your place of work, why not share it with the world? We can provide you a platform, and sharing your engineering mistakes and successes, is a great way to build transparency and trust with your customers, and promote a healthy learning based culture in your organisation.

Pact Message Workshops​

We've recently been working on a suite of Pact Message based examples, to show you how to test asynchronous systems with Pact, by concentrating on the messages sent between systems, rather than the underlying queuing system that transmits them.

We've taken PactFlow's kafka e2e example (consumer/provider), based on our common Product domain example and built out a suite of examples, in various Pact client DSL's.

You can find the new workshop over on GitHub pact-foundation/pact-workshop-message where you can see the Pact message concepts demonstrated in the following flavours.

• Pact-JS
• Pact-JVM
• Pact-Net
• Pact-Go
• Pact-Python
• Pact-Rust

We hope to build out a tutorial on the website, and further enhance it by adding synchronous message examples as well in the near future.

Pact RFCs​

We still have two RFC's currently awaiting review, why not take a look and add your review in the spirit of collaboration and open-source. The proposers would really appreciate and value your input.

1. rfc: configuration and shared files proposed by @JP-Ellis
2. rfc: Define matching rules for form-urlencoded body by @tienvx

Pact-Plugins​

Have you written a Pact plugin, or used one yet? We've seen a few community members create some, here are some that I've found.

• pact-avro-plugin written in Kotlin
• pact-avro-plugin written in GoLang
• avro-schema-as-pact-contract-plugin written in Kotlin

If you haven't and want to try it out, why not follow our Pact Plugin course, where you will learn the basics and get to build you own Plugin with templates we've provided to help you out.

If you fancy building one in a different language, I've created a suite of examples which you could use as a basis for your own project. Check them out here in my Pluginopedia.

Pact-Plugins - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-plugins.

Pact-JS​

James Gauld has been working on a couple of fixes in the Pact-JS lifecycle hooks.

• fix: support async afterEach hook
• fix: allow hooks to run only once per interaction

Pact-JS - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-js

Pact-Python​

Pact-Python 2.2.2 was released, which included initial support for matchers in the Pact V3 interface.

Check out the example test, for sample usage.

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

Tien has been reworking some of the examples in the Pact-PHP repo, and adding more features, with more Pact generators, as defined in the V3/V4 Spec, including supporting the fromProviderState generator for advanced use-cases.

Why not try them out?

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Pact Broker​

• Stanislav provided another PR to the Pact Broker ecosystem, this time adding the --ignore <PACTICIPANT> flag to the pact-broker cli's can-i-merge command in this PR

• Want to run a Pact Broker in Azure? Ian Crowl provided this addition to the docs, which still requires a bit of work,but might be enough to get you started!

Pact-Broker - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-broker.

Pact Net​

Pact-Net V5 has now been released. It contains several fixes and features, including leveraging the latest pact ffi 0.4.23

If you want to leverage the Pact V4 Specification, which will allow you to have multiple interaction types in a single Pact file, you should upgrade now, and a great place to start is the upgrade guide.

If you prefer learning by example, the workshops have been updated to use the latest Pact V5 release.

• https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-workshop-dotnet
• https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-workshop-dotnet-core-v1

As well as the E2E examples

• https://github.com/pactflow/example-consumer-dotnet
• https://github.com/pactflow/example-provider-dotnet

You can check out the PR history, to see the delta for the migration from Pact-Net V4->V5.

Pact-Net - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-net.

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

Lewis Prescott - Reliable End to End Testing with API Contracts using Cypress & PactFlow​

Lewis recently took to the stage at CypressConf to teach users about the fundamentals of contract testing as well as how to implement consumer-driven contract testing with Cypress + Pactflow.

Murat K Ozcan - A triple whammy of contract testing posts​

Murat penned another post, this time looking at Pact Message. It's backed by examples in GitHub and well worth a read/look.

• Solving Cross-Execution Issues in Pact Testing with Kafka and Message Queues

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 6k other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf

👋🏽 Welcome to the September Pact Blog, where we'll be covering all the updates in the Pact ecosystem along with events & material you've been sharing across the web.

Pact OSS Updates​

Pact RFCs​

We have two RFC's currently awaiting review, why not take a look and add your review in the spirit of collaboration and open-source. The proposers would really appreciate and value your input.

1. rfc: configuration and shared files proposed by @JP-Ellis
2. rfc: Define matching rules for form-urlencoded body by @tienvx

Pact-Plugins​

Back in March, we mentioned an issue when leveraging the Pact-Plugin framework with Pact-Go.

I'm pleased to say that the fix in the pact-plugins repo, was accepted and merged, to change the loading mechanism for plugins, from Tokio tasks, to System threads.

Pact-Plugins - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-plugins.

Pact-JS​

Pact-JS-CLI is now smaller, and leaner, with os/arch specific npm packages created for all supported platforms, thanks to this PR. The resolution for packages should be invisible to the end user, resulting in smaller downloads, and less disk-space being used by redundant files.

Available from V16.x - See the release notes for more detail

Want to see the same change in pact-js-core? Why not let us know!

Pact-JS - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-js

Pact-Go​

The pact-plugin update to switch from tokio tasks, to system threads was accepted, which allowed us to add the change to Pact-Go, hopefully fixing random panics during plugin based tests, highlighted in this issue.

Initial feedback is really positive. If you had this issue before, and it now appears to be resolved, why not let us know?

CGO or not to CGO? - In an infamous post by Dave Cheney, he mentions cgo is not go, and the mandatory requirement of cgo, in pact-go v2 has caused some users issues in initial setup. We have the potential to mitigate this requirement, by leveraging a project called ebitengine/purego, which describes itself as a library for calling C functions from Go, without Cgo. You can track the issue and associated pull request, to find out more.

Alpine Linux - We've been trying to get Pact working across alpine, natively, for all of our supported client languages, GoLang included. Follow the progress here. We are blocked at the moment due to some segfaults during the verification process and would appreciate any extra eyes, if this feature enhancement would be useful to you.

Pact-Go - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-go.

Pact-Python​

Some examples using the Pact-Python V3 interface, have now been included in the repo, thanks to Amit S in this PR.

Val Kolovos is also working on a Matcher proof of concept here in order to try and complete this open issue to Implement a Matcher interface, it has just been merged, but is awaiting the release of Python 3.14 (which has been delayed by a few days), before it will be released, however you can build the project locally to try out Val's changes today.

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

Tien has began some incremental improvements in Pact-PHP V10, now that that v10 is now GA.

Two notable additions include

• feat: All custom provider headers
• feat: Add graphql example

These changes are currently on the master branch and unreleased, so will require to use the dev-master version if you want to pick them up.

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Pact Ruby​

@trammel submitted a PR to remove webrick from a dependency to a dev-dep over in pact-ruby, however it will need pact_mock-service to be updated to use an alternative over webrick, and to be able to drop it as a runtime dependency completely. If anyone fancies attempting this, please let us know.

Webrick suffered a round of CVE's recently, so the Pact ruby ecosystem has been updated (pact-ruby-cli, pact-ruby-standalone, pact-broker).

Sbmt-Pact - Pact V3/V4 & Plugin Support​

The Kuper development team recently announced an open-source ruby gem, called sbmt-pact, which builds on the pact-ffi ruby wrapper gem I created.

Yuri, a Senior developer at Cooper, has created a comprehensive blog post (note: written in Russian, so you may need to use your favourite translator) which covers lots of points

1. general principle of operation of contract tests;
2. about the problems we encountered when implementing contract testing and how we solved them;
3. how we developed our solution for contract testing of Ruby applications;
4. about setting up CI/CD to automate contract tests.

I would wholly recommend reading the article especially as it also explains why sbmt-pact came to be

1. the official ruby ​​gem only supported V1/V2 specifications, which only allow testing of http interactions;
2. the grpc/kafka interactions we need are supported in the V3/V4 specifications;
3. a little earlier, in the process of evolution and support of V3/V4 specifications, pact-foundation decided to rework the architecture and switched to shared rust-core , which assumes that test libraries for different stacks use FFI (foreign-function interface) as a single interface for interacting with the core in rust;
4. the official ruby ​​gem remained in limbo for a long time and was not developed, in parallel pact-ruby-ffi was created , providing a low-level interface to pact-core;
5. and only recently plans have emerged to develop an official ruby ​​gem and support V3/V4 - see Pact V3 Tracking Issue and Pact V4 Tracking Issue .

I particularly like these two quotes from the summary

Pact turned out to be not just a framework, but an entire ecosystem ready for any challenges of modern microservice architecture. With support for various languages ​​and protocols, it becomes an indispensable ally in the fight for code quality.

and

Ruby developers are especially pleased: even when official support lags behind, the community will always find a way out. Our experience with sbmt-pact is a vivid confirmation of this. This once again proves that there are no unsolvable problems in the open-source world.

I totally agree with you Yuri. 🙌

Why not try out sbmt-pact, and give the authors some feedback?

Pact-Ruby - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-ruby.

Pact Broker​

The Pact Broker image was updated to leverage Ruby 3.3.5 in v2.122.0.

Pact Broker Chart​

Shane Hull added the ability to set svc annotations, check out his PR here. It was merged and released this month.

Pact-Broker - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-broker.

Pact Net​

Pact-Net V5 Beta 3 has now been released. It contains several fixes and features, including leveraging the latest pact ffi 0.4.23

V5 of pact-net is considered to be pretty stable, and is being used in a few production workflows and we expect it to become GA very soon. If you want to leverage the Pact V4 Specification, which will allow you to have multiple interaction types in a single Pact file, you should upgrade now!

Pact-Net - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-net.

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

Murat K Ozcan - A triple whammy of contract testing posts​

Murat has recently been taking an adventure in the world of Pact, after picking up Marie & Lewis' Contract testing in Action book. He has written 3 posts which are well worth a read.

• My thoughts and notes about Consumer Driven Contract Testing
• Strengthening Pact Contract Testing with TypeScript and Data Abstraction
• Handling Pact Breaking Changes Dynamically in CI/CD

Pact & AI​

Generative AI, has become a dining room table topic and you may be wondering how it may impact the world of contract testing.

Both Matt and I take you through a 3-part journey, where we explore the importance of contract testing, the potential of Generative AI, and how PactFlow have turned a concept into reality, harnessing the power of GenAI, Pact best practice, and up to date knowledge of our consumer DSL's in order to allow you to unlock the value potential of contract testing sooner.

• The Case for Contract Testing: Cutting Through API Integration Complexity
• Unpacking GenAI’s Role in Contract Testing
• Bridging Development Gaps with AI-Augmented Contract Testing

Pact & AsyncAPI​

The PactFlow team support a tool, called swagger-mock-validator, which allows you to compare a Pact file containing HTTP interactions, against an OpenAPI document. Originally created by Atlassian, it opened up broader use-cases than the traditional consumer driven approach with Pact, of replaying the interactions against a running provider, however does not offer as strong a guarantee, as it is reliant on the actual implemented provider, not drifting from the api description that is presented to consumers.

Whilst provider drift, is something that the industry has not fully addressed, (the ability to ensure a provider implementation completely honours its API description), the demand for static comparison tools to compare Pact files, is still there.

There is potential to couple both approaches, using API design documents as central points of truth. Using Pacts powerful DSL to generate consumer contracts. Using static comparison tools to ensure they honour the API description. If they differ, a proposal must be made in the documentation to reflect this. Pact plays a role in the verification of the provider, by replaying the Pact interactions, it mitigates provider drift from the consumer contract perspective, which with a static comparison tool, has been proven to adhere to the API description, eliminating provider drift for the known consumed endpoints in use.

Maybe in the future, we will see Pact being API description aware, in order to verify the implementation adheres to the API description.

However in the interim, one of the most requested comparison features, was Pact vs AsyncAPI.

AsyncAPI, for those who are unaware, is an API description format that covers event-driven systems, which consume or send messages, with a particular content format. The messages themselves may be transmitted over any number of different protocols, described as bindings in the AsyncAPI.

Message Pact, allows for the contract testing of service messages, without being interested in how the messages themselves are transmitted.

A recent introduction to the Pact ecosystem, exposed a plugin mechanism, which allows users to create their own custom content-type matcher & transport capabilities, which allows Pact users to consider content-types and transport capabilities not currently available in Pact, but leveraged in AsyncAPI based descriptions.

In order to try and progress momentum in providing a way to users to leverage AsyncAPI in their Pact journeys, I have created pact-asyncapi-comparator.

npx pact-asyncapi-comparator <Pact File Location> <AsyncAPI File Location>

It will allow for the comparison of application/json message content, in a V3 or V4 specification Pact file, against a valid AsyncAPI 2.x/3.x document.

I'd love for message pact users, to give it a go, and if it doesn't cover your use case, let me know in the issues section.

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 5.8K other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf

👋🏽 Welcome to the August Pact Blog, where we'll be covering all the updates in the Pact ecosystem along with events & material you've been sharing across the web.

Pact OSS Updates​

General Updates​

Pact RFC Process​

We mentioned an RFC process being introduced into the Pact ecosystem, last month, I'm pleased to say the PR has been merged, so I would invite users to begin to raise new RFC's where appropriate as we would love users to participate and help shape the future of Pact you want to see.

Specific language updates​

Pact-Reference​

Max Campman dropped a PR here to allow non-object matchers for array-contains.

Whilst Ron performed few fixes and incorporated the v2 Pact mock server into the Pact reference libraries

• feat(pact_consumer): Upgrade pact_mock_server to the new 2.0.0 version
• fix(pact_models): ProviderStateGenerator name was not correct
• fix(pact_verifier): Provider state values should be passed to any plugins under a providerState key
• fix(pact_models): Provider state values may be passed in under a "providerState" key
• fix(pact_verifier): Plugin feature was not enabled in the verifier
• fix(plugins): Plugin config needs to have seperate values for HTTP request and response parts

If you are a user of the Pact FFI library, we're hoping to see a new version released very soon with all of the above changes included.

Pact Mock Server​

v2.0.1 was released, which defaults the Pact spec version to the version from the Pact if not overridden.

Pact-Reference - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-rust.

Pact-Plugins​

v0.5.0 of the pact-protobuf-plugin was released and contains the following features:

• Supports injecting provider state values into message fields and gRPC metadata

  • An example of usage is provided here

• Better use of package names in resolving messages (Thanks to @stan-is-hate for this mammoth effect and offer thanks to Eric Muller who also took time to review.).

v0.5.1 of the pact-protobuf-plugin was released and fixes handling of google.Structs correctly as raised in this issue.

An example of usage is provided here

v0.5.2 of the pact-protobuf-plugin was released and fixes fixes HTTP Protobuf interactions can have a message defined for both the request and response parts.

Ron also added some examples in both JVM and Rust, for tests which use HTTP and gRPC transports in the same test. You can find them here

Pact-Plugins - Slack​

Have you tried out Pact Plugins yet? What's stopping you?

Chat with us in: #pact-plugins.

Pact-Go​

Pact-Go v2.0.7 has been released which updates libpact_ffi to 0.4.22 & adds Windows CI coverage.

Pact-Go - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-go.

Pact-Python​

Val Kolovos has continued adding features for pact-python, after the blog post announcing async message support in pact-python using the new rust core, he is now working on introducing matchers.

If you want to get involved, don't forget, we have a Pact Compatibility suite which is a set of BDD style tests to check compatibility between Pact implementations. There are full implementations in JVM, and Rust, with Tien over in Pact-PHP using it to guide and validate his Pact Rust core based implementation of Pact-PHP.

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

Artur Neumann dropped in a documentation PR, to help users test multiple interactions, in a single test, thanks!

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Pact Ruby​

Want to see V3 & V4 Pact Specification support in Pact-Ruby?

So do we!

There are two ways we can achieve this.

1. Utilise the Pact Rust FFI
2. Implement V3 & V4 spec support in Ruby

The latter option is less preferable, as by reusing the Rust FFI across all of our Pact client libraries, we aim to provide a consistent set of functions and experiences for users. However this may present a paradigm change to existing Ruby users, who had the benefit of using the Pact Core built in Ruby natively, whereas other language users relied on the Pact Ruby Gems being distributed in a standalone mechanism.

We are tracking work across three tickets

• V3 Spec
• V4 Spec
• Pact Rust FFI Integration

Please feel free to have the issues and see if you can help!

Chat to us in: #pact-ruby.

Pact-Compatibility-Suite​

A Set of BDD style tests to check compatibility between Pact implementations has been created in the pact-compatibility-suite

Current examples

• pact-rust
• pact-jvm
• pact-php
• pact-python
• pact-ruby-ffi

In order to validate pact-go, pact-js & pact-ruby and it's adherence to the pact-specification, it would be good to begin to implement the following tickets.

• Verify Pact-Go against pact-compatibility-suite
• Verify Pact-JS against pact-compatibility-suite
• Verify Pact-Ruby against pact-compatibility-suite

Anyone is welcome to start implementing these, we are beginning to see contributors to pact-pythons v3/v4 implementation, so why not join in?

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

Mark Bradley - GopherConUK 2024 (Talk)​

Mark Bradley spoke at GopherConUK 2024 about "Using Pact to deploy Microservice with confidence". Thanks Mark, we will be reaching out to send you some swag!

Augusto Colombelli - Contract Tests — APIs Guided by Consumers (Blog)​

Augusto Colombelli dropped in a PR to list his latest blog Contract Tests — APIs Guided by Consumers, which you can read over on Medium here.

Bas Djistrka - Practical contract testing with Pact (Course)​

Bas Djistraka from OnTestAutomation has just published details on his newest course, Practical contract testing with Pact. I'll let Bas describe it in his own words.

Contract testing is an approach that addresses the challenges of large-scale integration and E2E testing in distributed systems. It is not a new technique, in fact, it has been around for several years now, but unfortunately there aren't many good introductions, examples and use cases that clearly show the added value of contract testing, and how it can help speed up integration testing.

This course is designed to change that. Through hours of videos, quizzes and hands-on programming exercises, you will learn everything you need to know about contract testing, Pact and the tools in the Pact ecosystem.

You can take a look at the https://ontestautomation.teachable.com/p/practical-contract-testing-with-pact to find out more and sign up.

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 5.8K other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf

👋 Hey all, 2024 is racing ahead ⏳, we are now 212 days into the year 😲, as I write this July Pact Post. As usual, I'll be keeping you up to date with all the latest happenings across the Pact Ecosystem.

Pact OSS Updates​

General Updates​

Pact RFC Process​

As you may be aware, there are multiple places where one can get help or request changes to the Pact ecosystem, either across the whole ecosystem, or for an individual repositories. Canny, our public roadmap, GitHub project boards on individual repositories, Slack to name a few.

Some of Pact's maintainers also work together, and as such conversations, discussions and agreements can be made but not consistently communicated, leaving users, for example who don't frequent Slack, or one of our maintainer sessions, to feel excluded from conversations.

As such we've decided to deprecate our Canny roadmap and have migrated 95% of the issues to GitHub, in our new Roadmap repo, to keep issues close to where the code is.

To try and counter some of the concerns around the decision-making process, we felt a RFC (Request for comments) process would be beneficial to allow for a record of proposed changes and decisions, and provide a central place to users, contributors and maintainers to go.

You can view the first pass at what the RFC process may look like in this proposed PR.

We would love users to participate and help shape the future of Pact you want to see.

Specific language updates​

Pact-Reference​

Pact FFI​

Another month, another release for libpact_ffi, this time 0.4.22

It includes some QoL fixes, including correcting pact-plugin shutdown behaviour on Windows, and users being unable to find pacts #67, when using a Pact Broker URL which is hosted on a sub path #420

For a full list, check out the release notes.

Pact Mock Server v2.0 is here \o/​

We mentioned in April, that Ron was redesigning Pact Mock Server, as the existing mock server implementation was written in 2017-2019, and contained some esoteric TLS code that was more complex to upgrade to Hyper 1.0 than to rewrite it using newer Hyper 1.0 constructs.

Upgrading to Hyper 1.0 also brought us the following benefits:

• Supports both HTTP 1 and 2 with the same server implementation
• Supports protocol upgrades (leading to supporting things like Web Sockets)
• Middleware support
• No more need for the custom TLS code

Check out the release log to find out what went into the rewrite, and watch out for the updated mock server making it's way through the Pact ecosystem shortly.

Pact-Reference - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-rust.

Pact-Plugins​

It's been nearly 2 years since we introduce the Pact Plugin framework to the world.

We've seen 2 plugins created by Pact maintainers (pact-protobuf-plugin, pact-csv-plugin), 2 created by non-maintainers (pact-avro-plugin, in-house json-rpc plugin) and provided a course to guide you on how to build your own plugin (pact-matt-plugin).

We know there are some rough edges, and we have been mulling over what the future of Pact-Plugins could look like. We want to start gathering feedback from users, maintainers and plugin authors, even if you tried it out and got stuck. We will see an RFC (request for comments) ticket being raised in the Roadmap soon and we would like to hold some group sessions to discuss, where participants will get to earn some swag for their time, as well as the satisfaction of being able to shape Pact Plugins destiny, whatever that may be!

Pact-Plugins - Slack​

Have you tried out Pact Plugins yet? What's stopping you?

Chat with us in: #pact-plugins.

Pact-Go​

Pact-Go v2.0.6 has been released which updates libpact_ffi to 0.4.21, go deps, and you'll find an updated Dockerfile which is tested in CI, along with newly added MacOS CI runners (both x86_64 & arm64). Windows CI will be added soon, the pact-plugin shutdown fix came out of issues in executing plugins in this PR. Oh and you might have found that if you are using plugins in pact-go, that they aren't shutting down cleanly, fixed that for you.

I've also been trying to track down a pesky intermittent bug on MacOS/Linux systems whilst using plugins. Some workarounds were applied directly to pact-go in the above release, however I believe the proper solution is in the pact-plugin driver. I've added a pull request which I hope to get merged soon, and pulled in pact-go.

Pact-Go - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-go.

Pact-JS​

Pact-JS-Core v15.1.1 has been released which updates libpact_ffi to 0.4.21.

Pact-JS v13.1.1 has been released which fixes #1229 - MatchersV3.reify doesn't extract payload from MatchersV3.nullValue()

Pact-JS-CLI is doing well, we are seeing lots of users switching over going by the ~23.5k downloads since we released it last month. I've put in a PR for review, which aims to leverage npm's optional dependencies, to support packaging and releasing of os/arch specific npm packages, which are consumed in the main project. This has the benefits of ensuring that only the required binaries for the platform you are running on, are downloaded.

Pact-JS - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-js.

Pact-Python​

Val Kolovos has continued adding features for pact-python.

Check out the PR here: Feat/async message provider and keep a lookout on the pact-python blog for a dedicated post soon

Thanks Val 💛!

If you want to get involved, don't forget, we have a Pact Compatibility suite which is a set of BDD style tests to check compatibility between Pact implementations. There are full implementations in JVM, and Rust, with Tien over in Pact-PHP using it to guide and validate his Pact Rust core based implementation of Pact-PHP.

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

Tien has been enjoying the summer, and a well deserved break after the epic work bringing the pact rust core to pact-php, so put down that 🍸 and give it a try!

Anyone can start testing pact-php with pact_ffi code by updating their composer.json

"pact-foundation/pact-php": "10.0.0-beta2"

This brings a raft of features to the Pact-PHP ecosystem including V4 Pact Specification support, access to the Pact Plugin ecosystem and huge speed benefits over the 9.x Ruby based release.

You can see a full range of examples here

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Pact-Net​

Want to see Pact Plugin support in .NET?

There is an open RFC where you can add your input, and possibly contribute to bringing the capabilities to pact-net.

To help nudge this along, I've created a suite of .NET examples exercising many of the known pact plugins in the ecosystem, along with the raw pact_ffi calls required to utilise them.

You can check it out here - pact-dotnet-ffi-plugins

In order to get this into Pact-Net, one would need to propose some API designs in the RFC, and then can leverage the examples I've created (probably adding your own .NET developer flair to them), to leverage Pact-Nets idiomatic API design, and use plugins in their current V1 form.

We appreciate there are some rough edges, and will be opening the floor to a discussions around the existing framework to ascertain where improvements need to be made or if a V2 design is warranted and what that may look like.

However we shouldn't let the future dictate what we can achieve now, so forth and plug pact-net into the pact-plugin ecosystem!

Pact-Net - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-net.

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

Holistic Testing with Microservices - Lewis Prescott​

Agile testing evangelists Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory had Lewis Prescott on talk about how to use holistic testing with microservices and contract testing. Don't miss it over on YouTube here

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 5.7K other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf

👋 It's June, we've just passed the Summer Solstice, and some of you may be engrossed in footie-fever supporting your favourite team at the Euros ⚽. Good luck!

In this month's update, we will showcase what has been happening across the Pact OSS Ecosystem, letting you know how we got on at GitHub's Merge festival in Berlin, and sharing some of the latest community events coming up this year.

Pact OSS Updates​

General Updates​

Specific language updates​

Pact-Reference​

The Pact Rust core saw a good set of enhancements and fixes this month, with the latest release of pact_ffi 0.4.21.

This is mostly being driven by an increase of usage of the FFI interface, across client libraries which is resulting in issues being raised and fixed. Some of the key highlights include:

• Content Type detection was improved for repeatable behaviour cross-platform. PR here
• Merging pacts would result in duplicate interactions, this has now been fixed. PR here
• Work on improving the message related FFI interface.
  • Discussion here, get involved.
    • feat(ffi): add async message iterator
    • feat: add with_generators
    • feat: add generate_contents methods
    • feat(ffi): add with_metadata

Check out the release notes here

If you've spotted something, once you've raised an issue, sometimes the best way to try and sort it, is yourself. We are happy to guide through the process, so don't be shy, get involved!

Pact-Reference - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-rust.

Pact-Plugins​

Ali Ustek helped with some maintenance work and updated the pact-plugin JVM driver to Gradle 8. It was a decent bit of work and it's much appreciated as it saves the core maintainers time to focus on other areas.

Pact-Plugins - Slack​

Have you tried out Pact Plugins yet? What's stopping you?

Chat with us in: #pact-plugins.

Pact-Go​

Back in April, GoLang recently introduced v1.22.x which has affected some of our users, and was raised: Runtime error occurs with golang 1.22.x.

It transpires the error was actually at our end, and was solved by the issues original poster fix: use the same signature for the same function (#402).

There was some impressive debugging done by the GoLang team which makes for an interesting read. Check it out here.

I'm going to use some of that new found knowledge to help me with my own debugging in the future.

Pact-Go has also been updated to v0.4.21 of the pact_ffi library, bringing smaller binaries, improved content-type detection, and the next pact-go release will be the first to offer native alpine support. Subscribe or star the repo for notifications, otherwise I'll update the post to let you know when it's released.

How are you finding Pact-Go? Let us know in the Slack channel.

Pact-Go - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-go.

Pact-JS​

Few bits of big news for Pact-JS this month:

• Pact CLI tools (ruby based) have now been moved from @pact-foundation/pact-core to @pact-foundation/pact-cli. This is to make it easier for users to find the CLI tools, and to make it easier to maintain the codebase. You can find the new CLI tools here and read the migration guide here.
  • This dropped the package size from 353 MB to 164 MB
• Alpine Support is here! Pact-JS now supports Alpine Linux, which is a lightweight Linux distribution that is commonly used in containerized environments. This is a big win for users who are using Alpine Linux in their environments previously having to port applications to a glibc (debian etc) based distro.
  • Pact-JS-Core from v15.1.0
  • Pact-Core from from v13.1.0
• Package sizes are now smaller, the pact rust core binaries have been made smaller, so despite adding 2 new platform/arch combos, the package size has further been reduced to 116 MB.
• Content-Type detection is improved via a fix in the pact rust core.
  • Related pact-js-core issue here

Pact-JS - Slack​

Chat with us in: #pact-js.

Pact-Python​

We spoke last month where Val Kolovos assigned himself to one of the tasks: Add support and example for a message consumer test using Rust engine and we wished him luck!

We are pleased to say that we now have a V3 and V4 async message consumer test example in the Pact-Python codebase. This is a great step forward for the Pact-Python ecosystem, and we are excited to see how this will help users in the future.

Check out the PR here: Feat/async message consumer

Thanks Val 💛!

If you want to get involved, don't forget, we have a Pact Compatibility suite which is a set of BDD style tests to check compatibility between Pact implementations. There are full implementations in JVM, and Rust, with Tien over in Pact-PHP using it to guide and validate his Pact Rust core based implementation of Pact-PHP.

Pact-Python - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-python.

Pact-PHP​

The v10 Beta2 release is here, which includes the new pact_ffi 0.4.21 release and all the fixes that came along with it.

Check out the release notes here

Anyone can start testing pact-php with pact_ffi code by updating their composer.json

"pact-foundation/pact-php": "10.0.0-beta2"

This brings a raft of features to the Pact-PHP ecosystem including V4 Pact Specification support, access to the Pact Plugin ecosystem and huge speed benefits over the 9.x Ruby based release.

You can see a full range of examples here

Pact-PHP - Slack​

Chat to us in: #pact-php.

Community Events​

Are you talking about Pact or contract-testing this year at an event? Why not let us know and get yourself featured!

GitHub Merge Festival - Berlin​

We had a great time at GitHub's Merge festival in Berlin), where we had the opportunity to meet some of you in person. It was great to see the community come together and share their experiences with Pact. We also had the opportunity to listen to some of the GitHub team and other event members, and discuss how we can continue to work together to make the developer experience even better.

If you are close to Berlin but didn't get to this event, don't miss the WeAreDevelopers World Congress on 17-19 July 2024. We won't be there unfortunately, but it's a great event to attend if you are in the area.

It got pretty busy :)

Brighton Java User Group​

Bas Dijkstra is continuing his contract testing tour, this time in Brighton on the 25th July, with the topic 'Solving the integration testing puzzle with contract testing'. If you are in the area, make sure to check it out.

GopherConUK 2024​

Mark Bradley will be speaking at GopherConUK 2024, 14th-16th of August. He his topic will be "Using Pact to deploy Microservice with confidence". If you are attending, make sure to check out his talk.

You can also check out some of his previous material on the topic of Pact, on his blog site here: https://mark-bradley.net/tag/pact/.

Community Videos​

Made some cool video content showcasing Pact? Let us know to get featured!

What is contract testing?​

Check out Daniel Knott providing an introduction to contract testing, along with further reading to help aid your journey. Check it out on YouTube here. He covers many different testing topics, so this along with it others are certainly worthy of your time.

Thats a wrap​

Want to carry on the conversation? Sign up here to join our Slack community, where you will be amongst over 5.5k other users. It's a safe place to ask questions, and a great place to share the awesome work you are doing in the Pact ecosystem.

Whatever you are up to, let us know, and we can look to get you featured in the Pact post.

See you next month folks!

Cheers, Saf