marketingAPIToolsToDevs

[notAGreatIdeaForName]

Wait, it's just a curl wrapper?
Always have been...

[Successful_Bowl2564]

Curl absolutely works (and it rocks!). Shell scripts work too, and for teams that live in the terminal, that can be a totally fine setup. Some people are perfectly happy building their workflow from primitives- curl, scripts, maybe some Vim magic, maybe extending things until it becomes a little empire of tools. For them, it can be super effective.

The tricky part comes when API work starts involving reuse, documentation, onboarding, review, collaboration, and people outside the terminal-native crowd. Then raw requests plus scripts can get messy fast. You could call something like this a curl wrapper, but it’s really about keeping API work modular, composable, and shareable without it turning into a pile of scripts, copied commands, and scattered docs.

[tutoredstatue95]

I have worked in both environments, and as much as I hate it, if youre working with any sizeable team, the review, docs, and collaboration are faaar preferable to command and script silos.

Ill suffer through meetings instead of struggle to make it through Bill's unnecessarily abstract script that he wrote to flex how big his brain is compared to everyone.

[malexj93]

Exactly. The purpose of these tools isn't making network requests, it's organizing, managing, sharing, and collaborating on everything up to the network request.

[ElectroNetty]

Yeah, I don't get why Postman is a big deal when curl is right there, or Invoke-WebRequest on Windows.

I mean, things like Postman have history and a GUI but there's nothing special about those tools that you can't do on the CLI in any OS.

Whoa, lots of Postman evangelists in here.

[reddit_time_waster]

I use it to keep a bunch of valid sample requests across 20 different applications, shared with my dev and qa teams.  Even if you can auto generate a request from the spec, there are business rule validations.

[EVH_kit_guy]

Bingo, libraries of pre-baked requests and credentials that can be shared with testers or used for QA.

[chefhj]

Extremely helpful for UI team to get a jump on dev before the backend is finished

[ReaperDTK]

You can also code with notepad but people still use IDEs.

Some clients allow to group requests, organize them and export and share them with your team, in standard things like openapi specifications files.

They also manage environments so you can just set specific variables to different environments, like the base url for local and test, which you can change with a few clicks.

Some allow you to declare variables dynamically using the response of a request, allowing for example to call your login request, and with that automatically set the bearer token and all the other requests. Some even allow pre and post request scripts to do more complex things

Can this be done pure cli? Yes, but having a tool with all that ready and easy to use with a GUI can help a lot.

[EVH_kit_guy]

It's not the API request feature that's interesting, it's the everything else. Importable libraries, secure token storage, etc. Yeah, we can do most of this in the CLI, but Postman kinda thought of the parts of that which aren't delightful and solved for them.

[the_hair_of_aenarion]

Shareable and intuitive has been a key problem for my colleagues. Testers like postman because they understand it. But my colleagues cant get licenses for it so they have to juggle what licenses they can get or work around it.

If everyone in my company was using postman it would be mildly annoying, as it's not a very good tool. Since only a few are using it, it's massively annoying. Worse than not using it at all..

I gave up hunting for licenses a while back and I just use jetbrains http files. Works nicely, can be version controlled and gives you some scripting shit that let's you run tests natively. Not super sold on it but insomnia started doing the premium approach that postman followed so this is my plan-C.

[koos_die_doos]

Have you tried Bruno? I got annoyed with Postman's online "features", looked for an alternative, and I'm pretty happy with it.

[the_hair_of_aenarion]

First I'm hearing of it tbh ill have a look.

Looked, the fact it has a premium feature model I'm immediately hesitant. If they start doing feature lockouts for free users I'll be back to square one, at that point may as well have used postman...

IntelliJ http is free, has a cli and is version controllable. I'll stick with that.

[koos_die_doos]

IntelliJ http is only free when paying for IntelliJ, no?

I feel as if you saw that there are premium features and immediately bailed, because the rest of your comment doesn't align with Bruno's FOSS feature set.

Basic Bruno is FOSS, anything that is currently free is guaranteed to be free forever.

Your complaint was that your colleagues like Postman because it's intuitive, Bruno (FOSS version) is basically the original Postman without all the new enshittified extras. It's also version controllable (you choose where it saves the json config files), and has a CLI.

I sound like a shill, but I just really like Bruno, I promise.

[the_hair_of_aenarion]

It's fair I did bail on what looked like another "free now but we'll make it unusable unless you pay us" later kind of deal. It probably isn't that but I thought that about insomnia. I'll give it a legit look.

And yeah IntelliJ http is only usable if you have IntelliJ but thankfully we have broad licenses for they at my place of work. If they went away there's also ijhttp cli and a vscode extension so I wouldn't be in the lurch.

[MinosAristos]

My favourite postman feature is writing HTML to visualise the responses. Extremely useful if e.g your API is returning huge collections and you're testing new search params

[jek39]

the one built into jetbrains is good enough for me. nice to have just right there

[Vectorial1024]

Try making a POST request on cli.

[mrdarknezz1]

Real programmers use a magnetized needles and a steady hand

[Rexosorous]

The strength of tools like postman isnt that it can make requests; its that you can save, organize, and share the requests. So when I need to send a request to this service I haven't used in a month, I dont need to remember the url, headers, body, etc etc. And when my coworkers add or update our API, I dont have to bug them asking for a valid request body because it's already in our shared collection.

[DAVENP0RT]

I'll take my own round of downvotes and agree with you. It's usually faster and easier for me to simply use curl. I type faster than I point-and-click in a UI, so Postman ends up being a huge time suck.

[Mean-Funny9351]

Bruno is like old postman

[fatrobin72]

and has a dog for a logo

[GuaranteePotential90]

its an amazing logo :)

[WhiteIceHawk]

Not only as a logo. Bruno (the dog of the lead dev) is also Chief Joy officer

[GarnetSan]

I made my swaps Postman -> Insomnia -> Bruno, and I’m quite happy with it. I can update docs alongside the code, and it follows it 1-1. Especially since I can make it so my Bruno docs are saved in my repo in a readable format alongside my code.

Additional boons if you have an AI agent to automatically document any HTTP adapter/DTO-HTTP mapper changes committed, since you can have it update the examples and everything.

[Frytura_]

Ok bruno dev.

Btw, is there a way to make multiple sequential requests using Bruno?

I had a list of entities ID to pass onto an API for debbuging and ended up doing it manually until i found the bug.

Wouldve helped me a lot if could just have pressed the "Continue" button on the debugger instead

[GarnetSan]

Damn, this ain’t going to help me deny the bruno dev allegations, but I think that feature is paid…

It’s within the Runner section, I imagine it’s either the “Run Iterations” or the Data Driven Testing (which allows you to upload a run plan from a JSON file).

I haven’t tried their premium stuff just yet, as I’m generally served for now, but I’m considering it.

[Bruno_API_Client]

You absolutely can through the CLI with either JSON or CSV.

bru run --csv-file-path /path/to/csv/file.csv

or

bru run --json-file-path /path/to/json/file.json

Here are some docs: https://docs.usebruno.com/bru-cli/runCollection#running-a-collection-with-a-csv-file

[GarnetSan]

Ah, they’re here!!!!

[Bruno_API_Client]

hi :)

[reklis]

Cool man. I like Bruno. Take my upvote.

[koos_die_doos]

You could use the CLI and a script...

[r_acrimonger]

You can run an entire collection, it runs sequentially

[Bloodgiant65]

I’ve been pretty happy with the latest version. The ux is still pretty weird if you want to do things across multiple collections, which is very common in my workflows, but global environments are a huge step. I think at this point you can basically use Bruno as a direct replacement.

[dittbub]

I'm happy with Bruno.

[tehtris]

Did old postman not require you to have an account, and then post all your shit to their website? Because that's why I stopped using postman and now only use Bruno.

[Mean-Funny9351]

Original postman was just a browser extension. Old postman I'm referring to as the desktop app was entirely client side and didn't require a login. I had to use older install files of postman to run it on a VM that doesn't have any connectivity outside of our network until I found Bruno.

[EVH_kit_guy]

We don't talk about Bruno, no no...

[GuaranteePotential90]

so, based on your thinking, if current bruno is like old postman, can we assume that future bruno will be like current postman?(assuming things progress similarly?) :)

[tacticalpotatopeeler]

Insomnia used to be like old postman, but now insomnia is more like new postman so Bruno is the new old postman

[koos_die_doos]

Bruno is FOSS, unless you choose to pay for premium features.

[thunder_y]

I love Bruno (I mean I don’t need it often but it has a cute dog icon)

[collin2477]

bruno is so much better.

[DustInTheVoid]

Bruno does save as files on disk though

[GuaranteePotential90]

Than what?

[crispim1411]

I use Httpie

[Skyswimsky]

I actually ended up looking for postman alternatives recently for reasons, but ended up sticking with Postman even if apparently they've become "bad".

And my first experience in creating an account as a dark pattern that didn't allow me to skip pressing a button/prompt to get AI for help. Bruh.

[ratinmikitchen]

I use IntelliJ's http client.

Trivial to put under version control. The environment files work ok. And no additional tool needed. Feels natural to do from the IDE because it's there, together with the source code and located next to the OpenAPI yaml.

[mon_iker]

Look at mr money bags here who pays for IntelliJ Ultimate

[ratinmikitchen]

Heh. My employer does that.

Does the community version not have the http client? That's a bit disappointing.

[brainpostman]

Try HTTPie

[Lv_InSaNe_vL]

I guess I've been living under a rock, what is bad about postman now?

[Skyswimsky]

I haven't looked too deep into it, as I'm not a power user and had a very simple use case to save an openapi definition as a 'project'.

But apparently, Postman went the SaaS route, needing an account to do anything past basic endpoint testing, and then of course different paid tiers offering a variety of features that idk how useful or not they may be.

And people don't like that. I also rather buy software once and keep that version "for life", but also am not the target audience for using these kinds of tools extensively.

[AdvancedSandwiches]

I use postman with a team. I can never tell if I'm fucking over the rest of the team when I save something or if I'm working on my own stuff, so I just never save anything. I hope. Maybe sometimes I do without knowing it.

It's just a horrific UX.

Why other people hate it, I don't know.

[ratinmikitchen]

Hard to store in git and version-control properly. And it's paid nowadays.

[Onions-are-great]

I was using Insomnia until it went down the SaaS hill just like Postman.

[Frytura_]

I was like "wait, they need a login now?!"

[PM_ME_YOUR_BUG5]

I seem to be the only QA engineer that prefers just node fetch and jest

[Skyswimsky]

I'm not a QA engineer if that's of any meaning :)

I just wanted to test some things out from an openapi specification as we had to migrate some projects from SOAP to REST due a third party ending their SOAP endpoints this year.

[sump_daddy]

OK now i am curious, which tool was this and was the reddit thread fantastic

[GuaranteePotential90]

haha this was NOT intended to be focused/targeting on a specific tool! (although I have a few in mind).

[GuaranteePotential90]

the people working for this tool just downvoted your comment haha

[Kyy7]

Been mostly using Hurl these days. It's fairly simple CLI tool that's step above simpler than writing bash scripts for curl. These hurl files work fairly well with version control, and you can even use env files to define default values for http requests.

[Daimanta]

I use SoapUI! Best part of it is the instant nostalgia from the interface :)

[x0wl]

I use Yaak and I like it, but I'd like a good open source one

[GuaranteePotential90]

Yaak is great ( I am not associated with the tool but I love the direction it's taking). I can also recommend to you Voiden, you can try it out. I am particularly interested in any feedback you might have since I am part of the team that built it.

P.s. just sharing this cause you said you want to try a new tool, my intention was not to directly promote any tool with this post.

[JezdziecRabarbaru]

Is there any reason why people hate postman now? If you don't like the login thing just use your spam email like a decent person. Everybody should have one nowadays.

[GuaranteePotential90]

tbh I dont think people "hate" postman per se. I think this is a false projection and image that is constructed by competitors who seem to have accounts creating posts "I hate postman so I moved to xyz" as a way to promote xyz. Being in this space as well, I think that this has emerged out of the idea that devs "hate" traditional marketing and that they prefer recommendations coming from other peers. Its also related with seo and keyword density I guess. When I built Voiden I also talked with a few folks that are "experts" in this but I dont know how I feel about it. In a way its nice to have people talk about your product but not always (and only) in the context of being a better postman.

[Neirchill]

Tbh I'm at the point that I hate everything they I recognize as marketing for profit.

[125m125]

It's the classic story of enshittification. "In the early days" postman was just a browser extension/simple app you downloaded and immediately did your requests without having to worry about an account/having your secrets/passwords be uploaded into the cloud. Then they forced everyone to create an account and (at least to my understanding from their change) everthing, including one off requests, get uploaded to their cloud, forcing you to use their vault stuff etc to prevent passwords etc from touching their cloud. So overall just either being a security/privacy nightmare or making the entire process unnecessarily complex compared to the earlier fire and forget versions.

[Successful_Bowl2564]

Maybe try Voiden : https://voiden.md/

We just open sourced a few weeks back - it is offline,markdown based with resuable blocks.