15 ms·
Show HN: Insomnia REST Client now open-source
- deepanchor 9y agoHow does this compare to Postman?
- mod 9y agoI greatly prefer it, although if postman doesn't have any annoyances for you, then insomnia might not be better for your use case. Mostly the environments & variables make insomnia pretty fantastic.
- gramstrong 9y agoHow do its environments and variables differ from postman?
- simplify 9y agoIt loads much faster, which matters a great deal to me.
- tthayer 9y agoIt isn't dependent on your browser, which has made testing much more reliable in my use cases. My workplace uses a lot of single-sign-on stuff which makes it hard to authenticate using service accounts and whatnot.
- tedmiston 9y agoWhen you tried Postman were you using the web app version (eg, in the Chrome store) or the native version (eg, in the Mac App Store)?
- tthayer 9y agoI wasn't aware it had a desktop app!
- tedmiston 9y agoI wasn't either for a long time, and the desktop app has been much smoother in my experience.
- elcapitan 9y agoYes, recently noticed that I had some file upload issues with browser-based postman, and they suddenly disappeared when using the standalone. Not sure why, same settings. Looked like the browser based couldn't get the file/form encoding right.
- gschier 9y agoHey everyone! I've been working on Insomnia for over two years now and am super excited to be able to share it with the world. Let me know if you have any questions.
- paol 9y agoI've been using it since it was featured in HN some time back. It's a very nice improvement over the chrome extensions I had to use in the past. One question: should I resubmit bugs previously sent to support@insomnia.rest to the github bug tracker?
- gschier 9y agoThanks! Yes, please do. I have a few dozen emails in my inbox that I have yet to get around to yet.
- hyades 9y agoThe process to update Insomnia in Linux is quite painful. the only option is downloading a new .deb every time.
- gschier 9y agoI haven't had the time yet to learn how to host an apt repository. Maybe one day :)
- tthayer 9y agoI use this nearly every day and it has really helped me build better middleware to connect various REST APIs together. Well worth $50/year.
- gschier 9y agoThanks! Glad it's helping :)
- nbrempel 9y agoI work on a system that integrates with several APIs of varying degrees of quality. Using Insomnia easily saves me hours of effort every week.
- eddyg 9y agoDoes anybody have any direct experience with how this compares to Paw[1] (a "native" Mac app) in terms of performance, features, etc.? I currently use Paw and am happy with it, but this seems like it could potentially be a nice product to recommend to Linux and Windows users. [1] https://paw.cloud https://paw.cloud
- gschier 9y agoJust wanted to say that, as the creator of Insomnia, I love Paw. If I didn't need a cross-platform app at my last job, I might have never started working on Insomnia.
- dorian-graph 9y agoCan you import Paw files? Plan on having extensions like Paw?
- gschier 9y agoYou can't at the moment but there is a project that Paw is leading to make converting API formats easy: https://github.com/luckymarmot/API-Flow https://github.com/luckymarmot/API-Flow I've started playing around with an Insomnia plugin framework but don't yet have a firm schedule on it.
- _pdp_ 9y agoTry this (https://rest.secapps.com https://rest.secapps.com) It is as close as it get to Paw. Also this (https://fuzzer.secapps.com https://fuzzer.secapps.com) for fuzz-testing.
- thejosh 9y agoIt works quite well on Linux (Ubuntu, XFCE).
- kej 9y agoFYI, the blog post and LICENSE file say GPL3, but the bottom of README.md says AGPLv3.
- gschier 9y agoThanks. Copy-pasta. Fixed.
- rhinoceraptor 9y agoIs there any plan to support importing the Postman v4 data format?
- gschier 9y agoI assume you mean version 4 of the Postman application. Version 4 of Postman can export v1 or v2 formats (the version of the export format itself), which can be selected when exporting a single Postman collection.
- rhinoceraptor 9y agoThat worked, thanks. I assumed Postman version 4 must have had a different data format since when I exported all my data, importing it didn't work. It must be a different, proprietary format.
- ratpik 9y agoPostman only has a v1 and v2 data format. No proprietary format. The formats and the SDKs [1] to use them are also open source. The transformer for converting between versions is also open source [2]. Importing works fine for me. You could leave an issue on Github if you found a bug while importing. [1] - https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-collection https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-collection [2] - https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-collection-transformer https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-collection-transforme...
- freestockoption 9y agoOoh, I wonder if this supports Swagger.
- CodyReichert 9y agoI'd be interested to know this as well. I've been solving this problem while building Assertible; generate a suite of API tests from a Swagger spec: https://assertible.com/blog/testing-an-api-using-swagger https://assertible.com/blog/testing-an-api-using-swagger
- gnud 9y agoLooks very nice! But: GPLv3 and code generation is a scary combo. Do you sell a commercial license? If not, you should add a license exception.
- gschier 9y agoGood point. I didn't think that GPL-generated code must abide by the same license, but it seems to be a debated topic. Best to be safe.
- matt4077 9y agoYou should find out if Harry Potter was written in Word and buy some MS stocks, then.
- jfoutz 9y agogcc would like to have a word with you.
- gnud 9y agoGCC already has a license exception, because the output includes code written for GCC, as well as code written by the user.
- BrunoJo 9y agoA "Run in Insomnia" button would be great which I could add to the API documentation of my project (like this insomnia://run?method=post&url=example.com%2Fapi%2F)
- gschier 9y agoThat would be awesome. I just added a (still undocumented) protocol handler to import remote files (like insomnia://app/import?uri=https://foo.bar/file.json https://foo.bar/file.json). Putting the data right in the URL would be awesome as well, though.
- max23_ 9y agoThanks, this looks neat! I like how you output the SSL handshake in the "Timeline" tab.
- timvdalen 9y agoI've been using Insomnia for the past couple of months (switched from Postman) and I'm really liking it. The workspace switching is especially powerful. One thing though: every time the auto-updater runs, it places a shortcut on my desktop (Windows), which is really annoying.