spec

The object model for OpenAPI v2 specification documents.

Announcements

• 2025-12-19 : new community chat on discord
• a new discord community channel is available to be notified of changes and support users

You may join the discord community by clicking the invite link on the discord badge (also above).

Status

API is stable.

Import this library in your project

go get github.com/go-openapi/spec

FAQ

• What does this do?

1. This package knows how to marshal and unmarshal Swagger API specifications into a golang object model
2. It knows how to resolve $ref and expand them to make a single root document

• How does it play with the rest of the go-openapi packages ?

1. This package is at the core of the go-openapi suite of packages and code generator
2. There is a spec loading package to fetch specs as JSON or YAML from local or remote locations
3. There is a spec validation package built on top of it
4. There is a spec analysis package built on top of it, to analyze, flatten, fix and merge spec documents

• Does this library support OpenAPI 3?

No. This package currently only supports OpenAPI 2.0 (aka Swagger 2.0). There is no plan to make it evolve toward supporting OpenAPI 3.x. This discussion thread relates the full story.

An early attempt to support Swagger 3 may be found at: https://github.com/go-openapi/spec3

• Does the unmarshaling support YAML?

Not directly. The exposed types know only how to unmarshal from JSON.

In order to load a YAML document as a Swagger spec, you need to use the loaders provided by github.com/go-openapi/loads

Take a look at the example there: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-openapi/loads#example-Spec

See also https://github.com/go-openapi/spec/issues/164

• How can I validate a spec?

Validation is provided by the validate package

• Why do we have an ID field for Schema which is not part of the swagger spec?

We found jsonschema compatibility more important: since id in jsonschema influences how $ref are resolved. This id does not conflict with any property named id.

See also https://github.com/go-openapi/spec/issues/23

Change log

See https://github.com/go-openapi/spec/releases

References

https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/blob/main/versions/2.0.md

Licensing

This library ships under the SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0.

Other documentation

• All-time contributors
• Contributing guidelines
• Maintainers documentation
• Code style

Cutting a new release

Maintainers can cut a new release by either:

• running this workflow
• or pushing a semver tag
• signed tags are preferred
• The tag message is prepended to release notes