![]() ![]() But managing that for all the functionality of postman would be a challenge and bits would be likely to rot. The point about using a text based standard is valid (one of the things I like with jetbrains http client is this). Removing all the friction from that is a pretty big deal (especially as companies grow). With everything above, it's important to remember all of this can be done in a shared collaborative environment with a full audit trail and potentially SSO depending on the tier. There's also a whole bit around the API workflow/editor that I'm not going to touch on as I dont know that side of it well enough, but, it is there and something to be aware off. With newman, being able to take collections/imports from the UI and then use them with newman to do things like helm chart tests/continuous testing/run easily in a container allows the effort invested into creating stuff in postman and extend it beyond just the local dev experience. I'm giving it a special callout because if it wasn't for newman I'd have a lot more reservations about using postman. A CLI tool for running postman collections. Basically saving on the setup time/individual contributor trying to collaborate side of things. Simple concept, simple implementation, but having the ability to create an endpoint to post/etc data to, see what the output looks like and run it in a place which other engineers can access and you can collaborate easily on the output is a nice to have. Kind of an alternative to the like of pipewire or running your own nc/other implementation. The first is going to be a pain to maintain, the second doesn't work great for multi-language environments and while wiremock and it's ilk are easy to get up and running with, they do require additional setup and management. You could technically do this with netcat, or using a language specific approach, or another tool like wiremock. ![]() It can also get folk thinking a bit more about their mocks/contracts than they would be otherwise because it's just part of the existing toolchain. Having it built into the system which already has your open api specs, has SWE familiarity and is already there will often make this win out. With that said, sometimes 'technically the best' looses out to what's immediately available. There's a bunch of ways to do mock servers and I wouldn't say postman is technically the best ( personal preference is stuff like wiremock). Having a standardized way of handling this with the ability to extend it if needed can become a massive time-saver. At this point you're really in the realm of writing small-medium custom scripts to wrap the auth handling, save the tokens, refresh. Creating a way of handling auth which can be shared across a team becomes even more of a pain, especially if we're talking about auto refresh and the like. Handling auth in curl can be a real pain. This I think is where some of the power of postman really begins to shine (and tools like it). So postman has pretty rich support for a few auth types (api key, no auth, oauth 1.0 & 2.0, signatures, ntlm etc). You could use the openapi client generator to produce a curl command. ![]() ![]() As with a lot of this stuff, you /can/ do this without postman. Especially with the sharing capabilities which I'll touch on under the team side of things. Even as openapi/swagger docs on steroids with a richer http client this gets pretty powerful. This combined the the 'UI alternative to curl' really gives a lot of the foundational power for the other postman features. It's a pretty solid one, especially if you integrate with the API during your build process to version/upload the API specs. This will be the most commonly pointed at benefit of postman (and others like it) in my opinion. The ability to import openapi/swagger/protobuf (as of recently) and generate collections I'd say that the UI on top of curl is more accurately viewed as an alternative to things like jetbrains's build in http client. For folk not familiar with curl there's a lot of gotchas when it comes to escaping, handling auth, etc. For simple get/post requests, this is definitely the case. This is the most basic usage and a lot of the of other functionality is extensions of this. This is kind of expanding on koeffiezets comment.įor me postman's 'value add' can be broken down into three areas. With that said we use it pretty heavily so I might be able to provide some insights. I find the user experience to be counter intuitive compared to the likes of insomnia. To preface this, I'm not a massive fan of postman. ![]()
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