API Commons Blog
News and updates about API Commons, open source API operation properties, and the broader API ecosystem.
July 17, 2026 · 2 min read
Governance Coverage: Measure What Your Rules Examine
A clean governance run tells you your rules found nothing to complain about. It does not tell you whether your rules ever looked. Those are very different claims, and the difference is where blind spots live. So we bu...
Read more →
July 16, 2026 · 2 min read
Governance Pipeline Auditor: Score Your CI Setup
Plenty of tooling will tell you whether your API description is any good. Almost nothing tells you whether the pipeline that is supposed to be checking it is any good. So we built the Governance Pipeline Auditor — it ...
Read more →
July 15, 2026 · 2 min read
Governance Pipeline: A PR-Gating Blueprint
Most teams that put API governance into CI/CD assemble it from whatever fragment they find first — and the fragment they find first is usually the wrong one. We know this because API Evangelist read 1,005 real public ...
Read more →
July 14, 2026 · 2 min read
Spectral OWASP Ruleset: The API Security Top 10 as Rules
Most teams lint their OpenAPI for style but never for security. A study of 1,005 public API pipelines found only 14% run any security rules at all, and just 3.4% emit SARIF for the security tooling they do run. So we ...
Read more →
July 13, 2026 · 2 min read
Ruleset Commons: Provenanced Rulesets by Region and Industry
Most API linting runs on nothing you own. In a study of 1,005 real-world Spectral pipelines, 63% ran the linter’s implicit defaults and only 8 extended a shared, remote ruleset. The demand for governance is there; the...
Read more →
July 12, 2026 · 2 min read
Spectral Ruleset Studio: Turn Style Guides Into Rulesets
In a census of 1,005 public GitHub pipelines running Spectral, 63% ran the tool on its defaults with no rules of their own. The default ruleset is a config file that ships with the software — a hodgepodge of atomic ch...
Read more →
July 11, 2026 · 2 min read
Spectral Reporter: Lint Runs as Self-Contained HTML
Spectral produces excellent governance findings and terrible reading material. Its native output is a JSON array or a scroll of terminal lines that disappear the moment the CI job finishes — which means the people who...
Read more →
July 11, 2026 · 2 min read
Toolsmith: Forge MCP Tools and Agent Skills From Your OpenAPI
An OpenAPI tells developers what your API can do. Agents need more: an MCP tool for each operation with an honest input schema and behavior annotations, the resources and prompts that give it context, sampling guidanc...
Read more →
July 10, 2026 · 2 min read
API Reusability: Discover, Inventory, and Score
Every organization we talk to has more APIs than anyone can see at once, spread across teams, gateways, and repositories — which is exactly how the same capability gets built three times. The honest question, how reus...
Read more →
July 09, 2026 · 1 min read
API Documentation: OpenAPI and Arazzo From APIs.json
An APIs.json describes a collection of APIs — and since version 0.19 it can carry the artifacts themselves inline: full OpenAPI definitions, Arazzo workflows, prompts, and rules living right inside the index. So we bu...
Read more →
July 08, 2026 · 1 min read
API Discovery: A Registry That Lives in Your Browser
Most registries assume a central server that every team writes to and nobody trusts is current. But real API catalogs are relative to domains, teams, categories, and purposes — they are ephemeral and ever-changing, no...
Read more →
July 07, 2026 · 2 min read
API Validator: Governance Checks in the Browser
Most API governance tooling assumes a pipeline, an account, and a server that your document gets uploaded to. That is the wrong default for the most common moment of all: someone has a spec open and wants a fast, hone...
Read more →
July 06, 2026 · 3 min read
An MCP Server for API Governance
Every governance tool we’ve shipped so far assumes a human opens a tab. API Validator is a browser app. Discovery is a browser app. That’s the right default when a person is doing the work, but it’s the wrong shape fo...
Read more →
July 02, 2026 · 4 min read
A Universal Install Button for MCP Servers
Every MCP server today ships its own install instructions, and every one of them is different. A README that tells you to paste a JSON blob into claude_desktop_config.json. A different README that gives you a claude m...
Read more →
June 26, 2026 · 2 min read
The Diverse Vocabulary of API Properties
API Commons has always been about the things around the API — the properties that make an API usable, governable, and comparable: its documentation, its terms of service, its plans, its rate limits, its SDKs, and now ...
Read more →
June 14, 2026 · 3 min read
API Commons Properties Across 10,000 API Providers
The API Evangelist catalog has crossed 10,000 provider repositories, and running a count of which API Commons property types appear across those repos produces something worth looking at closely. Not because the numbe...
Read more →
May 23, 2026 · 3 min read
API Commons Vocabulary Expands in APIs.json 0.20
APIs.json 0.20 is in draft, and the biggest change is a significant expansion of the reserved word vocabulary — the standard types for naming properties in an APIs.json index. The vocabulary is the bridge between APIs...
Read more →
May 20, 2026 · 3 min read
The Integrations Page as an API Commons Artifact
Most “integrations” pages in the API economy are screenshots. A grid of partner logos. Sometimes a sentence or two. Almost never anything an agent — or another developer — can actually run. The page exists to convince...
Read more →
May 17, 2026 · 3 min read
How API Commons, APIs.json, and APIs.io Fit Together
API Commons, APIs.json, and APIs.io are three distinct projects that are designed to work together. They solve different parts of the same problem — making APIs discoverable, consistent, and usable at scale — but each...
Read more →
May 13, 2026 · 3 min read
API Commons Properties as a Checklist for API Governance
API governance is one of those topics that organizations talk about a lot and implement inconsistently. Most teams start with an OpenAPI linting ruleset — enforce summary fields, require response schemas, check for co...
Read more →
May 09, 2026 · 3 min read
How Spectral Rules Connect to API Commons Rulesets
If you work with OpenAPI specs in any serious capacity, you've probably encountered Spectral. It's the linting tool that lets you define rules for what a good API spec looks like — things like "all operations must hav...
Read more →
May 05, 2026 · 3 min read
The Difference Between Common, Community, and Blueprints
If you've browsed the API Commons site, you've noticed it's organized into several distinct collections: Common, Community, Base, and Blueprints. The names are suggestive but not self-explanatory. This post explains w...
Read more →
May 04, 2026 · 3 min read
Adding FinOps Properties to API Commons Over the Weekend
Spent the weekend pulling FinOps into the API Commons vocabulary. Cost management, billing transparency, and unit economics have always been part of how teams operate APIs in production — they just hadn't been part of...
Read more →
May 01, 2026 · 3 min read
What Belongs in API Commons in 2026
When API Commons launched in 2013, the central question was licensing. Could you declare in a machine-readable way that your API's interface was open, reusable, and not encumbered by the kind of intellectual property ...
Read more →
April 21, 2026 · 1 min read
Spec-Driven Integration: Capability Specs as Shared Integration Artifacts
The API Commons principle has always been that specifications are shareable artifacts. An OpenAPI document published to the commons can be consumed, implemented, forked, and composed by anyone. The specification exist...
Read more →
June 30, 2024 · 2 min read
Expanding the API Commons Beyond Just Licensing
With the recent renewed investment in APIs.io, APIs.json, as well as here at API Commons we are looking to expand the API Commons to apply beyond just licensing and support as many open source building blocks as we ca...
Read more →
February 04, 2015 · 1 min read
What Exactly Is API Commons?
As I travel around talking to folks about APIs, I spend as much time as I can educating folks about API Commons, and I’m constantly reminded how little people, who have even heard, and read about API Commons, re...
Read more →
July 16, 2014 · 1 min read
Support For Only Two Creative Commons Licenses In The API Commons
When we first conceived API Commons, we were a little fuzzy about which of Creative Commons licenses API providers should apply to their API definitions. As long as a provider took a stance on API copyright around you...
Read more →
July 09, 2014 · 1 min read
Fixing The Machine Readability in API Commons
When I first published 11 simple API definitions, I had developed using schema.org, into the API Commons, I made a mistake when I referenced the Swagger specifications for each of the APIs. I linked to the machine rea...
Read more →
June 05, 2014 · 1 min read
API Commons Added To The API Commons
Even with the risk of possible creating some sort of API wormhole, I just added the API Commons API to the API Commons. The API for adding and searching for APIs that are in the commons, now has an API definition that...
Read more →
May 14, 2014 · 1 min read
Nothing Has Change For API Commons In Light Of Oracle v Google Decision
Nothing Has Change For API Commons In Light Of Oracle v Google Decision
While we definitely are concerned by the response from the federal court in the Oracle v Google case, but for us at API Commons nothing h...
Read more →
May 14, 2014 · 1 min read
Nothing Has Changed For API Commons In Light Of Oracle v Google Decision
While we definitely are concerned by the response from the federal court in the Oracle v Google case, but for us at API Commons nothing has changed—it just turns up the heat. The precedent for applying copyright...
Read more →
May 07, 2014 · 1 min read
Green Button (Energy) API Added To API Commons
One of the most meaningful API projects I work on with the US government is the Green Button API, which provides access to energy data for US consumers across the country. First, what is the Green Button API? The Gre...
Read more →
April 07, 2014 · 1 min read
Adding Evercam.io To The API Commons
The Internet of things (Iot), and security camera API platform evercam.io has submitted the API definition for their camera API to the API Commons.
I’ve been impressed with the amount of leadership that is comin...
Read more →
March 03, 2014 · 1 min read
Added API For Searching And Adding API Definitions To API Commons
I think the title of this blog post has the most occurrence of API, I’ve ever used. We have had requests to provide an API for the API commons, so now you can add API definitions using a Github manifest, the AP...
Read more →
January 13, 2014 · 1 min read
Adding Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) API Definition
We are adding the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) API swagger definition to the API Commons today.
The FAFSA API is a working project to show the Department of Education what is possible when you turn...
Read more →
January 13, 2014 · 1 min read
When To Submit API Definition To The API Commons? Earlier or Later?
I had a great conversation with a company developing some very interesting API designs, and upon talking with them about submitting their API definitions to the commons I got a common question: When should we submit o...
Read more →
December 11, 2013 · 1 min read
It's Between Copyright And Fair Use In Oracle vs Google API Case
It's Between Copyright And Fair Use In Oracle vs Google API Case
I'm just getting time to read through the news coming out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the next phase ...
Read more →
December 11, 2013 · 1 min read
It Is Between Copyright And Fair Use In Oracle vs Google API Case
I'm just getting time to read through the news coming out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the next phase of the Oracle v. Google case, which kicked off December 4th in California cou...
Read more →
December 01, 2013 · 1 min read
Adding The OpenEd API To The API Commons
We have added the OpenEd API to the API Commons. OpenEd provides open educational resources like courses, videos and games for teachers to use in their classes.
Using the API, developers can read and write resources t...
Read more →
November 26, 2013 · 1 min read
Adding The CourtListener API To The Commons
Last week the Free Law Project launched their CourtListener API, which currently aggregates 2,204,339 court opinions, from 350 jurisdictions in the United States.
This week, we are honored to have their API definition...
Read more →
November 17, 2013 · 1 min read
API Commons Is More Than Just The Definition, Specification or Schema
API Commons is about providing a simple and transparent mechanism for the copyright free sharing and collaborative design of API specifications, interfaces and data models. When learning about API Commons it can be ea...
Read more →
October 11, 2013 · 2 min read
After A Very Successful Launch Of API Commons, What is Next?
We chose to launch API Commons at Defrag because we felt it was precisely the audience that would understand what we are trying to do, and we were right! Attendees of Defrag represent the leading edge of the tech spac...
Read more →