Pact Foundation

Can someone please let me know that for a design first development approach, is the unit tests only place where we can define our contracts?

If you’re using Pact to do this, that’s correct

Pact is a code-first API testing tool. If you try to do it another way (e.g. automate the consumer side) it will be quite difficult to manage on the provider side

Pactflow has a process that might work for your design first approach: <https://docs.pactflow.io/docs/bi-directional-contract-testing/>

<@U9UUY3CU9> How can we say Pact to be a code-first API tool, if we have to have the interactions known between the C and P, before we can add them to unit tests and generate a pact out of it? We do need designs between the two parties before hand right? Or am I missing something here?

It’s code first in that the tests are written in code, not in a spec/design first methodology (e.g. authoring an OAS or GraphQL schema before code is written)

&gt;  We do need designs between the two parties before hand right?
No, you can definitely write the consumer code and it’s expectations of a provider, without ever having “designed” the API. Usually, we’d expect a <https://docs.pact.io/pact_nirvana/step_2|conversation> before code is written, but we don’t need an OAS or other design (if that’s what you mean)