Introduction

TestBench Requirement Service is a lightweight, asynchronous REST API service for imbus TestBench that provides unified access to requirements from multiple sources, including Jira, Excel/text files, and JSONL.

Features

• Multiple data sources: read requirements from JSONL files, Excel spreadsheets (.xlsx, .xls, .csv, .tsv, .txt), or Jira via its REST API.
• Unified REST API: a single API surface regardless of the underlying data source.
• Interactive setup: a CLI wizard (init) that generates a complete configuration in seconds.
• Swagger UI: built-in interactive API documentation at /docs.
• HTTPS & mTLS: optional TLS termination and mutual TLS for production deployments.
• Reverse proxy support: first-class configuration for Nginx, Apache, and similar proxies.
• Extensible: create your own RequirementReader to connect any data source.

Core concepts

Concept	Description
Project	A top-level grouping of requirements. How projects are discovered depends on the active reader (directories on disk, Jira projects, etc.).
Baseline	A version or snapshot of a project's requirements.
Requirements tree	The baseline content exposed as a tree of folders/groups and leaf requirements.
Reader	A pluggable component that knows how to fetch projects, baselines, and requirements from a specific data source.

Architecture

The service runs a Sanic-based HTTP server and delegates all domain logic to a configured RequirementReader implementation.

┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│          TestBench RM Proxy          │
└───────────────────┬──────────────────┘
                    │  HTTP (Basic Auth)
┌───────────────────▼──────────────────┐
│    TestBench Requirement Service     │
│                (Sanic)               │
├──────────────────────────────────────┤
│          RequirementReader           │
├────────────┬────────────┬────────────┤
│    JSONL   │   Excel    │    Jira    │
└──────┬─────┴──────┬─────┴──────┬─────┘
       │            │            │
 .jsonl files  .xlsx/.csv  Jira REST API

Where to go next

• New here? Start with the Installation and Quickstart guides.
• Configuring the service? See the Configuration page.
• Choosing a reader? Check the Readers overview for a comparison, then dive into JSONL, Excel, or Jira.
• Running as a Windows service? See the Windows service guide.
• CLI reference? See the CLI commands page.