SpecVault Docs

Quick Start

Publish your first spec, set up a subscriber, and trigger a diff — in under 10 minutes.

Prerequisites: A SpecVault account and an OpenAPI spec in JSON or YAML format. No installation required — SpecVault is fully hosted.

Step 1 — Sign in

Go to specvault.sentinelflux.in and sign in. If your team doesn't have an account yet, request access at engage@sentinelflux.in. Once you're in, you'll land on the dashboard with an empty list of services.

Step 2 — Create a service

From the dashboard, click New Service. Fill in:

  • Name — a short identifier for your API (e.g. Payments API)
  • Team — the owning team name (e.g. platform)
  • Base URL — the base URL of the running service (e.g. https://api.example.com)

Click Create Service. You'll be taken to the service detail page showing an empty version history.

Step 3 — Publish your first spec

On the service detail page, click Publish Spec. You have two options:

  • Fetch from URL — paste the URL to your openapi.json or openapi.yaml endpoint. SpecVault will fetch and store it.
  • Upload file — upload a local JSON or YAML file directly.

Since this is the first version, no diff is performed — there's nothing to compare against. The version is stored with its endpoint count and publish date.

Tip: Use the Fetch from URL option in your CI/CD pipeline pointing to your staging spec endpoint. This makes publishing automatic on every successful build.

Step 4 — Add a subscriber

Click Add Subscriber on the service page. Enter the email address of the consumer team member who should receive breaking-change alerts for this service. They don't need a SpecVault account — alerts are sent to the address directly.

You can add multiple subscribers per service. Each subscriber can be removed at any time from the Subscribers tab.

Step 5 — Publish a second spec version to trigger a diff

Click Publish Spec again and upload a modified version of your spec. Make a change that should trigger a breaking-change alert — for example, remove an endpoint or change a required parameter name.

SpecVault will:

  1. Store the new spec version
  2. Diff it against the previous version
  3. Identify any breaking changes
  4. Send an email alert to all subscribers if breaking changes are found

Step 6 — View the diff result

On the service page, click the new version in the version history. The diff result shows:

  • Number of endpoints added, removed, and changed
  • List of breaking changes with HTTP method, path, and description
  • Whether subscriber alerts were sent

Step 7 — Set up CI/CD publishing

For ongoing use, publish specs automatically from your pipeline instead of manually. Generate an API token from Settings → API Tokens, then add a publish step to your CI:

curl -X POST https://specvault.sentinelflux.in/api/services/<service-id>/specs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECVAULT_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"spec_url": "https://api.example.com/openapi.json"}'

See the GitHub Actions guide for a complete workflow example.