SpecWeaver: End-to-End HTTP API Specification Inference across Multi-layer Routing in Production Web Services
HTTP API specifications are essential for modern web development, yet existing tools fail in production environments due to multi-layer routing. Production deployments employ infrastructure-level and framework-level routing that apply sequential rewrite and dispatch rules, creating a gap between client-visible external paths and internal paths. To address this challenge, we present SpecWeaver, the first tool to automatically extract and unify heterogeneous configuration-defined routing rules with code-level handlers. Our approach combines routing component information gathering, iterative configuration discovery using LLMs, and routing extraction from diverse configuration files to construct a routing graph representation that captures end-to-end routing relationships. Evaluated on 10 production applications, SpecWeaver extracts 36,361 rewrite rules and 48,394 dispatch rules with 99.44%/100% precision, materializes 8,288 external API paths, contributes 5,162 previously undocumented APIs with 160 unauthenticated endpoints, helps an existing testing tool improve testing coverage by 328.6% compared to the baseline, and discovers 305 bugs.
Authors
- Xiaonan Shi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8849-0766)
- Wei Huo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7121-1196)
- Jie Lu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4162-0404)
- Jingting Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9806-9054)
- Chenghang Shi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-3055-8929)
- Feng Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-2126-663X)
- Yi-Xiang Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4021-4228)
- Wenbo Hu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2625-7575)
Institutions
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Institute of Computing Technology (CN)
- Institute of Information Engineering (CN)
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Proceedings of the ACM on software engineering.
- Published
- 2026-06-30
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3808202
- Primary Topic
- Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China