Postman alternatives? - eviltoast

I would like to hear if any of you are using different app for API testing than Postman.

I’m not telling that Postman is bad, but maybe there’s all that I should check out. Recently I tried RapidApi and even tho the app is kinda cool I missed few options and went back to Postman for now.

  • Stopher@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    I am a fan of Insomnia. As far as I can tell it has most of the features I used in postman without all the paid upgrade nags

    • crusa187@vlemmy.net
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      1 year ago

      Seconding Insomnia. Sleeker interface imo, only thing it’s lacking in feature parity afaik is the cookie sniffer, but you can grab what you need in postman or js console and then plug it into insomnia np.

      Also, cURL :]

    • MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nzM
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      1 year ago

      The one thing I find difficult in Insomnia is making the auth common across a group of requests. I end up duplicating existing requests which doesn’t help if I need to update the process at all. Is there a way to use common auth routines yet?

  • CosmicPanda@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Another vote for Insomnia here. I used to use Insomnia primarily until a lot of my work switched over to gRPC and I’ve found that Postman works a lot better for that. I still prefer Insomnia for the simple UX and speed, just wish it had better gRPC support.

    • Sheldan@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I do have some bugs with Insomnia, for example with the oauth configuration failing. (I think it has something to do with some variable there failing) You can workaround that by just removing oauth, and configuring again, but its annowing.

      I still like insomnia overall tho.

  • snowe@programming.devM
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    1 year ago

    I completely stopped using all those clients. We now just store the requests alongside the code in an http file and use the built in IntelliJ HTTP Client to make the call. No need for a separate program, integrates with your code, you can save responses to make sure they don’t change, it’s all stored in git. There’s a ton of benefits and not many downsides.

  • thepiguy@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Insomnia, or if you really love the command line and dont need to document or save your API requests, curl (don’t recommend this for anything beyond simple testing).

  • schnex@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    I mostly use httpie on the fish shell with autocompletion for quick requests, but it’s no replacement

      • person4268@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        How’s nushell been for you so far? I took a look at it once when it was relatively new and was missing some features I needed, like shell scripts.

        • lorefnon@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          I like it. The docs are a bit scattered and I haven’t switched to it completely, but it has proven to be very handy for some scenarios where I scrape some content from external sources and pull them into a local sqlite as a long term structured archive.

  • Gushys@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Insomnia is great and has an easy, simple interface. But I feel like creating complex collections with different environments is a lot simpler with postman

    • kambusha@feddit.ch
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      1 year ago

      Same. I like this so I don’t need to open a second app. Only used PostMan and ThunderClient, so can’t comment on others.

  • pimterry@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m the maintainer of HTTP Toolkit - it’s not a Postman alternative (it’s an open source project focused on intercepting & debugging traffic, not sending it) but I’m actually working on building a UI for exactly this right now, so this thread is perfectly timed!

    Is there anything that any of you really love or hate about any of the tools suggested here?

    What core features beyond just “edit method+URL+headers+body, send, view the response status+headers+body” are essential to you?

    Anything you wish these tools could do better?

    I’m planning on taking the client functionality live within a few weeks max, so if you want to help your perfect Postman alternative come to life now’s the moment 😁

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The big three for me are:

      1. For a given project, maintain a list of HTTP requests I often need to send
      2. Some way to save responses, so I can compare how the server does respond to how it previously responded.
      3. Both need to be shared with my colleagues. And this must not share any auth credentials/tokens/etc that are in every request (I want that do be done separately with something more secure).
  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I recommend Visual Studio Code and one of the following two extensions:


    Either one isn’t really the full picture - you’ll ned to combine it with other extensions - such as a good JSON language extension (which will give you syntax highlighting, error checking, code folding/etc.

    The most important extension is CoPilot. That’s the killer feature which makes Visual Studio Code vastly better than Postman.


    Thunder is very similar to Postman. Not much to say other than it works well, it’s free, millions of people use it.

    It’s not really my cup of tea, but I do think it’s better than Postman because you can use your own version control servers to collaborate with colleagues, which is generally better (and cheaper) than Postman’s collaboration service in my opinion (you get diffs, code review, pull requests, history, etc etc for all your most important API tests).


    Personally I prefer REST Client (also free, and has even more users than Thunder).

    REST Client is really simple. It adds a new “HTTP” text file type. You simply type a HTTP request into the file and hit a hotkey (or click a button) to execute the request. And it shows you the response. Easy.

    HTTP requests and responses are just plain text, and you can simply save those as files in your project. REST Client also has basic support for variables, API credentials, etc. Not quite as user friendly as Postman or Thunder Client, but it makes up for that by being straightforward and flexible.


    CoPilot Chat, works with both, but having everything in plain text gives it more control over REST Client than Thunder Clinet you can write (and edit) your requests with a series of simple plain english prompts. E.g. “JSON request with a blog post body” will give you:

    POST https://example.com/blog/posts
    Content-Type: application/json
    
    {
        "title": "My First Blog Post",
        "body": "This is the content of my first blog post. It's not very long, but it's a start!",
        "author": "John Doe",
        "tags": ["blogging", "first post"]
    }
    

    You might follow that up with “Add a UUID” or “Add a JWT auth header”.

    Copilot can answer questions too - e.g. “How do I unsubscribe a user with the Mailchimp API?” They use the “HTTP PATCH” request type - WTF.

  • Kogasa@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I’m saying that Postman is bad. maybe not in terms of functionality, but damn if it doesn’t run like a slug on my work computer, which is just fine handling a dozen Visual Studio and Rider instances. It seems like it works perfectly for about 5 minutes and then goes to crap.

    So yeah, I’d be interested in an alternative too. I only really use it for basic functionality (creating, sharing, and running collections of requests with configurable parameters).

    • Buckshot@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Same for me, I’ll notice my computer is a bit loud, realise I forgot to close postman and it’s just sitting there, doing nothing, minimised, and my 12 core CPU is sat at 20%.

      I close postman, within seconds the fans spin down.

      I’ve tried a few alternatives but the rest of the team use postman and we’ve got shared collections and pretty extensive pre-request scripts and nothing else I’ve tried really fits the bill.

      • Kogasa@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        There is always the web version of postman. It can make localhost calls if you install their desktop agent. Might have better memory management somehow? I dunno.