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Postwoman – a free alternative to Postman
- ArchReaper 7y agoAnyone know how this compares to Insomnia/Postman? Ever since Postman started getting worse I switched to Insomnia and haven't looked back.
- rc_kas 7y agoI am also a happy insomnia user.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Justsignedup 7y agoInsomnia is fantastic. Never looked back to postman.
- wyattjoh 7y agoIt's GraphQL support is lovely.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoHow does Insomnia compare to Paw [1]? [1] https://paw.cloud/ https://paw.cloud/
- frou_dh 7y agoThat face-off could also serve as a case study of platform-native GUI (Paw) vs the much-maligned Electron (Insomnia, Postman).
- gschier 7y agoHi! Creator of Insomnia here :) The main differences are that Paw is a native Mac app, paid, and closed source. Insomnia is open source, cross-platform, and free to use (although there is a paid plan). Some of Insomnia's biggest differentiators are it's GraphQL query editor (autocomplete, linting, etc) and it's ability to be customized via plugins and themes.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoThank you for the reply!
- rjbrock 7y agoGraphQL is the reason I just switched from a paid Paw license to insomnia!
- chalst 7y agoFrom https://dev.to/liyasthomas/i-created-postwoman-an-online-open-source-api-request-builder-41md https://dev.to/liyasthomas/i-created-postwoman-an-online-ope... the author stripped down Chromium for the UI in order to get something much lighter than an Electron app.
- reificator 7y ago> the author stripped down Chromium for the UI in order to get something much lighter than an Electron app. If an organization did this, I'd be all for it. An individual? I'd bet this is going to slow down updates to Chromium significantly, and eventually lead to either security issues or maintenance fatigue resulting in closure of the project. I'm not saying it's 100% going to happen like that, but that's on the wrong side of my risk tolerance line for adding a tool to my everyday suite.
- gatherhunterer 7y agoIt’s essentially an API testing tool. It is mostly used to poke endpoints on a development server and sometimes to learn the output patterns of a public API, what security concerns are there in stripping the UI?
- reificator 7y agoIt's less about the actual changes made and more that one person is maintaining a branch that diverges (significantly?) from upstream, on a project that is fast-paced and constantly under attack. If I'm using this tool to run tests on the network, and I'm several patches of Chromium behind, that makes me vulnerable. That tradeoff can be worth it, but all I'm getting out of it here is reduced application footprint? I'd rather use the bloated tools or wait for someone with deeper pockets to make a less bloated tool. Or a similarly small project that writes it natively.
- yellowapple 7y agoI haven't exactly dug into the codebase, but "stripped down Chromium for the UI" could very well mean CEF, which is widely-used by a lot of things (commercial and otherwise) and directly supported by Google. However, whether that's more lightweight than Electron is debatable. If that concerns you, though (or if the author really did outright fork Chromium), it looks like it runs in an ordinary browser, too (e.g. via postwoman.io or localhost:3000).
- house9-2 7y agoInsomnia is great!
- cmdshiftf4 7y ago>Ever since Postman started getting worse I switched to Insomnia and haven't looked back. Curious to know what you feel as been getting worse with Postman? I'm a long time user of it myself and feel it has consistently done what it says it will do without much cruft.
- zip1234 7y agoReally like the simplicity of the testing integrated with it
- jawns 7y agoI'm curious about whether the product name "Postwoman" violates Postman's trademark and whether Postwoman will be getting a C&D letter soon, demanding that the name be changed. Normally companies don't get to claim broad trademark protection for prefixes -- Facebook has been shut down when trying to broadly enforce its trademark against anything prefixed with "Face" -- but "Postwoman" is close enough and is marketed as a competing product in the same place. Update: It seems the author is also worried about this. On her blog post announcing the service, someone raised the concern, and she acknowledged that it's a problem: https://dev.to/liyasthomas/comment/ee8m https://dev.to/liyasthomas/comment/ee8m
- epx 7y agoBut it is cool.
- redisman 7y agoTheir branding is cool but not really reliant on the name. The whole alien thing is pretty fun and simple
- ebg13 7y agoWhat if the name were changed to Pos2man? ^_^
- liyasthomas 7y agoAuthor here: I think this is funny because few reads it: posTWOman :/
- ebg13 7y agoI wouldn't have either except that your flying saucer logo (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liyasthomas/postwoman/master/static/logo.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liyasthomas/postwoman/mast...) really emphasizes the TWO. :D
- rhacker 7y ago
- Insanity 7y agoPostman is so horrendously slow when using a quite large "team space". I should really explore the alternatives
- thrownaway954 7y agoHow does this compare to insomnia. https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia
- muhammadusman 7y agoso happy that you mentioned this, my first time hearing of this. this is why I love HN, someone always has a suggestion/alternative! Going to use this instead of Postman now!
- PhilippGille 7y agoJust a side note: Insomnia was recently acquired by Kong (the API gateway): https://konghq.com/blog/kong-acquires-insomnia/ https://konghq.com/blog/kong-acquires-insomnia/
- gschier 7y agoIt looks like Postwoman is is more of a simple utility right now. Perhaps it will grow to something more full-featured in the future but that seems to be the main differentiator right now. Insomnia, for example, supports environment variables, a GraphQL IDE, plugins, and many different authentication formats. As the creator of Insomnia, I love seeing new projects like this and am really excited to see what Postwoman grows into. It looks awesome, is open source, and there's always room for more developer tools! :)
- mfontani 7y agoPosthuman was taken?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- frabbit 7y agoAuthor should take advantage of this suggestion. It's awesome and side-steps the noise around the current name.
- faissaloo 7y agoI'm all for anything killing Electron
- bob1122 7y agoSame, however this similarly is also a Chromium / JS mishmash
- faissaloo 7y agoSmall steps
- liyasthomas 7y agoAuthor here: https://dev.to/liyasthomas/postwoman-v1-0-a-free-fast-beautiful-alternative-to-postman-mn0 https://dev.to/liyasthomas/postwoman-v1-0-a-free-fast-beauti...
- ukyrgf 7y agoDoes anybody else take a project a _lot_ less seriously when all of their documentation and commit messages are plastered with emojis? I feel like I can't create a cohesive narrative in my mind when every sentence ends with a unicorn or a rainbow or a volcano.
- bob1122 7y agoAbsolutely, maybe I'm not with the trends but it seems unprofessional and doesn't add much value (for myself)
- blackearl 7y agoI see it a lot on here as well, even in very source heavy or scientific posts. It rubs me the wrong way when a post ends with ;)
- luketheobscure 7y agoWhen emoji use follows a strict convention (something like https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/ https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/), it can make it easier to scan a list of commits and get a rough idea of where the development focus is (i.e., hardening vs. feature development).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aylmao 7y agoI've seen this convention before. I personally find it more useful to tag commit messages with [fix], [docs], etc. It makes it more easily searchable, which is IMO what you really want. You can: git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit | grep "\[doc" to see documentation commits, and count them by piping to `wc`. Emojis feel... complicated. What do they mean? Here you're just typing the literal word so not much to remember or search.
- wehrkeoruw 7y agoYou can't search by arbitrary Unicode characters?
- kanox 7y agoSo I guess commit messages support emojis now. I've seen this before, but not quite so consistently.
- Koshkin 7y agoWhy does the word ‘woman’ look like a derivative of the word ‘man’? I think it’s unfair! (The term ‘female’ is no big help, either.)
- abdisalan 7y agoOr you could see it as man + (something) -- i.e. better than man. It really depends on how you take a normal word and assign an agenda to it.
- shantly 7y agoDitto "man" and "he" being used when the sex of the person in question isn't known, or as a poetic stand-in for "human"—the usual complaint about that is that it implies maleness is "normal" at the expense of women but it could just as easily be seen as erasing what's distinctive about maleness, at its expense and in favor of women, who get their own dedicated words that aren't multi-purposed and also used to refer to men in some cases. Just a matter of perspective who's harmed by it (if you take anyone as being harmed).
- Someone 7y agoOne can also see a male as 2/3 of a female or as a Fe-male with an iron deficit.
- mitchty 7y agoBecause it isn't a derivative of it. Have a listen to this podcast by a linguist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607712 The short answer is the modern word woman has a separate etymological root than the word man. And the word man has had linguistic changes recently that mask those origins. Woman as well actually. Man originally meant human really, and woman used to be Wifman (somewhat literally female human). Wife is a holdover from this prior to Middle english usage of the term. Old english used wer and wif as man/woman respectively, and as you can guess Werewolf derives from the old ussage of man. In short, its complicated and woman isn't a derivative of man. Its much more interesting than that. You can't look at the modern spelling of words to derive much on how we got to this point. You'll make a ton of categorical errors that way, especially in English given man used to just be the human race. Our modern take of man anywhere as needing to be replaced with woman depending on gender is slightly amusing once you know the etymology of the term in that regard.
- m3kw9 7y agoWhat’s the difference between this name and postman2?
- detaro 7y agoOriginal Show HN by the creator 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817627
- liyasthomas 7y agoAuthor here: yep, that was me.
- bort-simpson 7y agoI don't see a feature where you can create tests for responses which is a very important feature for me that exists in Postman
- calibas 7y agoMaybe I'm missing it, but I'm not seeing the full response headers, just "cache-control" and "content-type". Being able to see the full response headers would make this a much more useful tool for debugging APIs.
- liyasthomas 7y agoWould you like to report the issue faced on GitHub so that we could track and rectify them really quick.
- lilyball 7y agoI'm encouraged by the GraphQL support with docs, except there appears to be no way to provide headers (such as Authorization), which means I can't even fetch my schema.
- liyasthomas 7y agoAuthor here: GraphQL support is just landed on PW. Expect all functionalities in a month. Follow the project on GitHub.
- telekid 7y agoIf Postwoman doesn't tickle your fancy, I'd take a look at https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el. (I believe there's a vim equivalent, too.) You can save requests in a simple .http file, and check them into your codebase. Makes collaboration very simple.
- paedubucher 7y agoI always wonder why some many developers work with Postman (or Postwoman), and so without any automation whatsoever. Example: Requesting some JSON payload and extracting some generated id from it looks like a clumsy point-and-click adventure. With curl, you can use any appropriate program to extract output, say jq: curl acme.org/my/resource | jq -r '.id' I see how some project manager doing a presentation of a bleeding-edge feature might profit from Postman, but as a developer?
- yahyaheee 7y agoYea devs that use postman crack me up, in my experience you usually just aren’t writing tests
- paedubucher 7y agoExploring an API?
- ta34646856fh 7y agoFor one, the GUI allows you to store your various HTTP actions and replay them, and while you can get that in your shell it takes a bit more work to set it up/present it/reuse it. I've used it often for ad-hoc requests, where there's authentication/OAuth tokens required, JSON payloads that would be a pain to put into the shell. Obviously it doesn't negate the need for testing or replace tests, but not every ad-hoc investigation needs to be wrapped in a test.
- johnny22 7y agoI guess I don't do enough interesting queries to need a dedicated GUI client. I usually rely on httpie over plain curl or postman. I'd never even heard of insomnia.
- oliyoung 7y agoI'm re-writing an API and Insomnia is a required tool because ... * Non trivial authorisation * Chained commands * Templated requests * Random generation of content
- kamfc 7y ago"Politically Correct" penetrates software -- Support at your own peril -- you may be the next victim.
- K2L8M11N2 7y agoHow does one eyeroll in text? Asking for a friend...
- codesternews 7y agoThe author is Male. I am not sure just to get attention he brings gender issue in non gender name. Also it should be good idea to get some other name. The product itself is good. I am sad to see you get lot of attention because of gender instead of your actual work.
- thecleaner 7y agoIt should cost 80percent of postman technically.
- forgot-my-pw 7y agoWhat should a free version be? PostSlave?
- liyasthomas 7y agoAuthor here: Ask me anything! Shoot me any doubts, asks and I'll rectify them.
- nickjj 7y agoNice timing. If anyone is interested in how Postwoman was developed and deployed, the author of the project did a huge write up of her tech stack today. That's at: https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/5-postwoman-is-a-free-fast-and-beautiful-alternative-to-postman https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/5-postwoman-is-a-...
- liyasthomas 7y agoYes!! Author here. Please go through this.