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Insomnia REST Client
- oneweekwonder 9y agoPostman can import swagger specs[0]. Does insomnia have something similar? [0]: https://www.getpostman.com/docs/postman/collections/data_formats#importing-swagger https://www.getpostman.com/docs/postman/collections/data_for...
- brandonb927 9y agoYou can generate Swagger specs from Insomnia with a plugin, not sure about the inverse though... https://github.com/mlabouardy/swaggymnia https://github.com/mlabouardy/swaggymnia
- nickthemagicman 9y agoPostman can also export to share with team which I don't see insomnia able to do. Postman also has bulk edit of form requests.. I feel like postman is more fully featured so I'm sticking with it for now.
- embersdev 9y agoYes, insomnia can export/import.
- nkkollaw 9y agoThis is what I use. It's not bad at all, Postman's UI is _slightly_ more intuitive, but Insomnia's is good, too. I use it because they offer a .deb installer and Postman doesn't offer a package installer for Linux.
- tombert 9y agoMaybe I'm just a bit silly and not seeing it, but what does this give you over Postman?
- ayoubElk 9y agoNot sure if Postman does this, but one thing I like about Insomnia is that it keeps a history of all the responses from the server, a feature I find very useful when documenting API request & responses.
- STRiDEX 9y agoI switched because I prefer the layout. It reads very left to right. The area that you edit the request is very clear.
- okonomiyaki3000 9y agoWell, it will recognize your hosts file if that matters to you.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- misterbowfinger 9y agoKinda wish Postman had support for other protocols like Thrift & gRPC
- a85 9y agoYep. This is a work in progress. Watch out for an announcement in early 2018 about these and other description formats and protocols. :)
- Lord_Zero 9y agoDoes this allow signing requests with AWS Sig's + session tokens like postman?
- gschier 9y agoIf you mean AWS Version 4 Signing Process [1], then yes. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/signature-version-4.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/signature-versi...
- Cyberdog 9y agoFair warning that this is an Electron app. (Downvotes incoming!)
- milesokeefe 9y agoPeople may be taking your comment as general knee-jerk electron hate but it really is something to consider. If you're sending requests that can return very long json responses, Insomnia can lock up and force you to restart it. Paw is a pretty good native alternative but it's macOS only, doesn't have a free tier beyond a short trial period, and has some UI quirks that made me ultimately go back to Insomnia despite the electron borne downsides. If Insomnia could offload the request response parsing/formatting to a WebAssembly module it would be perfect.
- Cyberdog 9y agoI'm seeing that a fair number of posts in this comment thread say "I've had Insomnia and/or Postman freeze/lock up/crash with large responses." I can't recall ever having a problem with curl and a large response. Yes, these others are probably doing something like parsing the response and making it pretty and that's where the problem is. But just sayin'. (Also, most of the time, curl's memory usage can be measured in kilobytes. Again, just sayin'.)
- auxym 9y agoIsn't postman electron too?
- bhauer 9y agoFor the record, I upvoted you because I find that a useful warning. I am intrigued by this app, but Electron tempers my initial impression slightly. Putting it on the back-burner for now.
- nkkollaw 9y agoWhy, though.
- mtm 9y agoI've always been partial to 'restclient-mode': https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el So nice to capture a flow of commands and notes in a single plain text file
- simple10 9y agoThe source code link is buried on their website. https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia
- gschier 9y agoThere's a section on the footer of every page showing the contributors. Maybe I should add a GitHub link/logo too
- ah100101 9y agoI tried Insomnia a few days ago after Postman crashed over an exceptionally large response I was receiving. Insomnia was able to give me the full response after providing a warning about its size. Postman has been around a while so I assume they have a richer feature set, but was glad to see Insomnia handle this.
- cyberferret 9y agoI was a long time Postman user, but find myself using Insomnia more and more in recent months. Nothing wrong with Postman at all, but I just like Insomnia's cleaner and less cluttered UI. However, even as a regular user, sometimes I find the 'Send' button can be a lot more prominent than it is. The green '200 OK' response next to the Send button looks more like a button, and I keep inadvertently clicking on it to send my requests off! And when starting out with a fresh workspace, the 'Create New' prompt looks like a button that you can click to create a new query, but it isn't - you still have to use the hotkey to do so. Small improvements in the UI like that will go a long way to making this my default 'go to' API testing tool.
- exhilaration 9y agoI'm a long time Postman user as well, I'm still using the Chrome app version because I like having it open in multiple tabs - I can quickly compare responses from Dev/Prod by switching tabs. Does Insonmia or other REST clients support tabs?
- seanp2k2 9y agoLong-time Paw user here. I prefer it over this or Postman, but I agree that there are horses for courses. Paw lets you easily switch between a bunch of different requests, supports many auth schemes, can import the “copy as curl” right from your clipboard, can generate code for many languages (including curl), has a nice JSON viewer as a tree or as highlighted and formatted text, etc etc: https://paw.cloud https://paw.cloud I also like the collab features and ability to save the API spec alongside the source code if you wish. They also have some cloud sharing for teams that I haven’t played with.
- enraged_camel 9y agoI stopped using Paw because it’s macOS only. I work across multiple operating systems and that was very limiting.
- sorrymate 9y ago
- cube2222 9y agoI've been using it all the time for quite a while already. Generating different things like uuid's or dates in ISO format has been really useful. Same for environments. I also really like the UI.
- orliesaurus 9y agoIt's like ice-cream, some people like chocolate, others like vanilla...others (insert your flavor). I use a lot of httpie [1] and jq [2] - sometimes a GUI is nice to show other humans who might... mmhh... not like the CLI that much.. things in a more "eye pleasing way". As usual with these tools YMMV. [1] https://httpie.org/ https://httpie.org/ [2] https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
- drinchev 9y agoI also use cd / mv / cp / rm, but sometimes Finder (macOS) / Explorer (win) / Dolphin (kde) works better. Not for other humans, for me as well. It has all those shiny colors, icons, columns, drag & drop, that makes it easier and faster, when you have more complicated task. I guess it all depends, but GUI in general is a step forward.
- kachnuv_ocasek 9y agoIn my experience, the converse is true. Finder/Explorer makes only already easy tasks like cd/mv/cp/rm easier, but terminal is much better for more complicated operations, such as mass renaming, data file preprocessing, etc.
- oneplane 9y agoWhile I tend to agree with that, I would love to have a Postman/Insomia style client for SOAP. I still do some work that requires talking to (legacy-ish) enterprise applications that only do SOAP :-( On the CLI, that's just a bunch of unusable XML.
- qw 9y agoI have good experiences with the free version of SoapUI. It is branded as a test automation tool, but can also work well as a client. Just import your WSDL and it will generate requests for you. https://www.soapui.org https://www.soapui.org
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- wedowhatwedo 9y agoI don't have administrative rights on my work Mac. I tried to install via brew. Got this: Moving App 'Insomnia.app' to '/Applications/Insomnia.app'. Password: I can't find the app anywhere after sudo gave up because I don't have rights. I did get this nice message though: insomnia was successfully installed!
- gschier 9y agoYou can install the *.zip file an extract it, which will give you the Insomnia.app bundle. https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia/releases/tag/v5.12.4 https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia/releases/tag/v5.12.4
- deckar01 9y agoI have been working on an alternative to Postman and Curl with a modern terminal interface. The idea isn't fully fleshed out yet, but I really like using it when I am designing an API. It forces me to think about discoverability and encourages me to provide links in the response rather than encoding the API route structure into a client. https://imgur.com/gallery/jCNXx https://imgur.com/gallery/jCNXx https://gitlab.com/deckar01/ctf-api/tree/master/ctf_client https://gitlab.com/deckar01/ctf-api/tree/master/ctf_client
- politician 9y agoI might consider implementing HATEOS to enable a tool like this. Nice job!
- kdeenanauth 9y agoThis looks excellent
- deckar01 9y agoI really miss the folding tabs when I go back to my system terminal.
- alexanderdmitri 9y agothis + tmux => sweeet
- jstewartmobile 9y agoJust downloaded it. Quick and painless install (running Ubuntu 17). Starts quickly. Successfully made a few REST calls without difficulties. Wonderful!
- temp 9y agoI'll be sure to check it out once they switch from Electron.
- evanze 9y agoI switched to Insomnia after a few years of frustration with Postman crashing and its annoying tab behavior. The only thing I miss is a display for # of matches when searching!
- chasd00 9y agofor the command line I use Httpie, it makes more sense to me than wget or curl https://httpie.org/doc https://httpie.org/doc
- numlocked 9y agoFor emacs users, check out restclient.el[0]! Super easy to use, and it's trivial to save and organize common requests since...it's all just text :) Supports variables as well. Check out the readme for examples. Can't recommend it highly enough. [0] https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el
- pashky 9y agocmd-f'ed if anyone would mention it. not disappointed! thank you, guys :)
- adamhepner 9y agoGreat! What I couldn't find is: is it possible to get output from one command and store it as variable for use in another command? My example is simple: I need to get a token once, and then provide it as a header to all subsequent requests. The bugger is unfortunately valid only for a limited amount of time (some 10 minutes), which makes exploration a bit tricky, and I don't particularly like running search and replace all the time...
- Sir_Substance 9y agoI've been using insomnia daily for something like a year now, it's excellent. I would ask the developer to stop putting pop-up messages in it though. I use it because it's the cleanest REST client I've found, and it's extremely jarring to have the otherwise exceptional UX broken by a "latest release" popup.
- gschier 9y agoThe latest release popup modal dialog is no longer there starting from 5.12.0 :)
- jozi9 9y agoIt's really nice tool indeed, I much prefer this to Paw and Postman strictly due to UX. Less tabs, less popups etc, easier to navigate. I don't mind Electron either. I know it's shameless plug but I can't resist sharing my own tool that I created for monitoring REST apis, if anyone is interested: http://www.apilope.com http://www.apilope.com
- __s 9y agoStarted using this for the graphql support, tho unfortunately the dev hasn't had the time to expose introspection a la graphiql
- mmanfrin 9y agoBeen using Insomnia for a few months now, some things I really like: 1. Env switching. I believe this is available on other clients, but it feels very intuitive in insomnia. 2. The ease of using results from other calls and making method chains. When testing something locally, I can make a POST call and then click on my GET call and have it implicitly GET the id that was just created. 3. Computed values -- putting in uuids or timestamps for each new call without having to change them. I looked at the api and the code to add your own seems pretty straightforward. 4. Input data types are toggleable, but the form stays the same. This bugged the shit out of me with Postman: I'd fill out a form with my content body only to find I had marked the wrong content type, switched it, and saw Postman present me with a blank form.
- daxaxelrod 9y agoI thought this was an API I could order insomnia cookies with. Cool regardless
- scandox 9y agoI've always used a client inside my editor: - vim: https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client - emacs: https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el Seems to me it's hard to overcome the advantage of being able to immediately work with and edit response data. What are the major advantages of these standalone clients?
- haveanupvote 9y agoFor the CLI crowd, shout-out for resty: https://github.com/micha/resty https://github.com/micha/resty
- Improvotter 9y agoThe one thing all of these clients miss is a way to at the same time document your REST API. Else it feels like doing work twice. And I don't think exporting it to Swagger or something else is the same thing. I want to be able to edit my documentation live while testing it.
- notnarb 9y agoFor people already used to org-mode + curl (or any CLI tool), I highly recommend using those together when exploring an API (granted, this involves throwing simplicity out the window) :PROPERTIES: :header-args: shell :var PASSWORD=not :var USERNAME=narb :var AUTH_URL="nova.example.com:5000/v2.0/tokens" :END: ... #+NAME: get-openstack-token #+BEGIN_SRC shell :cache yes :results verbatim export DATA='{ "auth" : { "tenantName": "'"$TENANT_NAME"'", "passwordCredentials": { "username": "'"$USERNAME"'", "password": "'"$PASSWORD"'" } } }' curl -s $AUTH_URL \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data "$DATA" | jq -r ".access.token.id" #+END_SRC #+RESULTS[be67...]: get-openstack-token : deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef ... #+BEGIN_SRC shell :var AUTH_TOKEN=get-openstack-token curl -H "X-AUTH-TOKEN: $AUTH_TOKEN" ... Not to discount tools such as postman / insomnia or other built-in editor tools like restclient-mode, they are all fantastic tools Some quick reasons why I found this works best for me: * Org-mode is already great as a dedicated note-taking tool * This is immediately compatible with existing CLI examples or output from tools that offer 'export as cURL' -- this is especially useful if I want to reverse engineer an api request by browser is making * Easy to export to an html/wiki document for immediate consumption by others with working CLI examples * Composable with other CLI tools like jq and xmllint * Plain-text files are easy to version control
- emacsgifs 9y agoAre we assuming everyone knows that Org-mode is an Emacs package?
- lucideer 9y agoAs someone who has never used Org-mode, and only very briefly dabbled in Emacs during college, I actually think that's a pretty safe assumption around these parts. No?
- traviscj 9y agoEven if you are uncomfortable assuming that, search results for "org-mode"/"orgmode" are unambiguous and helpful for anyone out-of-the-loop and curious, so it doesn't seem exclusionary or like a secret in-joke reserved for a secret society of HN elite.
- zamalek 9y agoObligatory VSCode love. vscode-restclient[1] is a fantastic piece of work. You create a .http file and write what looks like raw HTTP requests (syntax highlighting and autocomplete included). The biggest "feature" for me is that it's incredibly source control friendly. All of our services have documentation in the form of an HTTP "script" right alongside the code. [1]: https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient
- gy0857478 9y agoi love paw
- Volt 9y agoI just use a Jupyter notebook and cURL or whatever language I'm using at the moment.
- _pdp_ 9y agoThere is also this one https://secapps.com/market/rest https://secapps.com/market/rest if you want even more UI goodness with support for variables and transformations. See the screenshots. Theme support is also going in soon. Disclosure: I am the founder of secapps.com.
- ryanpcmcquen 9y agoThis has a significant advantage over Postman (to me) because it is open source.
- murftown 9y agoNice, can't wait to try it! Btw, this is the official source code: https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia But I find it a bit odd that I couldn't find a link to the source code on the website. Edit: There is one, I just wasn't looking very well.