Vacuum

Vacuum is a very fast, dependency-free OpenAPI and Swagger linter built by Dave Shanley that runs the same style of rules as Spectral but at a dramatically higher throughput and with richer output. It reads an API’s contract, applies a RuleSet, and reports where the definition drifts from an organization’s design and governance standards, making it a practical engine for continuous API governance at scale.

• Spectral-compatible rules - Vacuum runs existing Spectral rulesets, so teams can adopt it without rewriting their governance investment.
• Speed and portability - Written in Go with no runtime dependencies, it lints thousands of specs in seconds, which makes it viable in CI and across a whole estate.
• Richer rule metadata - Beyond Spectral’s properties it adds fields like id, category, and howToFix, turning findings into actionable, categorizable guidance.
• RuleSets as a style guide - A RuleSet bundles individual rules into an overall guide, letting an organization encode its API design standards as executable policy.

In real API operations, vacuum is where governance stops being a document and becomes something you can run. I use it to score OpenAPI definitions against a baseline ruleset, categorize the results so teams are not drowning in noise, and generate governance reports that track quality over time. Its speed is what lets governance move left into CI and out across third-party APIs you consume as well as the ones you produce, and its structured output is exactly the kind of machine-readable signal that an agent-driven pipeline can act on automatically.