17 ms·

I used to like Postman, when it was a simple browser extension. I basically used it as a curl gui. Now > Postman is an API platform for building and using API

by paozac 5y ago

I used to like Postman, when it was a simple browser extension. I basically used it as a curl gui. Now > Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster. I guess I’m no longer their target user. Back to curl/httpie.

sbmthakur 5y ago
> I basically used it as a curl gui. I just use Browser's Network tab for that nowadays. CORS can be a trouble at times, but that can be avoided with a few tweaks.
- dewey 5y ago
  I think the killer feature for these separate tools is usually that you can easily do a right click -> "copy as curl" in the network inspector, then import it in Postman/Paw and then tweak parameters / add headers there. This is not really possible in the browser network tools.
  - nerdite 5y ago
    I take that curl command to https://curlconverter.com https://curlconverter.com And get Python that I can start iterating on. They have lots of languages. I used to use Postman but the clarity of the code is so much easier to see what’s happening vs postman imo.
  - panzerklein 5y ago
    It seems pretty easy with Firefox - there's "Edit and resend" in the context menu of every request.
    - dewey 5y ago
      And then you accidentally refresh or close the tab and everything is gone. I usually use specific requests over many days if I'm reverse engineering something so having these available, sorted in folders for me is important. Of course for other uses cases it might be fine to have them live in the browser.
      - ROARosen 5y ago
        Se above. On MS Edge chromium you can enable to save the requests and even saved environments
  - ROARosen 5y ago
    On the on Microsoft Edge chromium you can can enable an "edit and resend" feature save the requests to "Collections" and create request environments.
    - sbmthakur 5y ago
      I wonder if a such a feature can be added in Chrome/Firefox with an extension.
tluyben2 5y ago
It is also buggy, resource hog and instable. I use it on Ubuntu and os x m1 and I often have to kill it because it stops accepting any inputs or it ate all memory (and cpu after that when you click anything). Hoppscotsch and others are better now: I guess they wanted way too much too fast (I did not check but I suppose they got VC money?)?
- quambene 5y ago
  Can confirm. Unfortunately, Postman is too resource-hungry (on Ubuntu). Launching is taking a while as well. I have to admit I'm quite surprised that VS Code (which is also an electron app) is relatively fast and resource-sensitive. Having open a few applications in my daily workflow, moderate resource consumption is getting an important selling point for me.
adam_arthur 5y ago
The UX has gotten noticeably worse for me. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but now you have to setup a project and name things before you can actually start issuing requests. And I found the whole experience a bit confusing in terms of user flow
- cyral 5y ago
  It really needs some love in the UX department. There are so many icons and toolbars it is hard to understand where to find things or why they are placed where they are.
- ljm 5y ago
  New law: Any novel product with VC funding will inevitably grow a vestigial CMS.
nileshtrivedi 5y ago
Try Insomnia or Hoppskotch.
- oweiler 5y ago
  How is Insomnia any different? It's basically an OSS carbon copy of Postman.
  - piaste 5y ago
    I switched to Insomnia about a year ago for two main reasons: - Didn't choke when having ~50 request 'tabs' open - Didn't try to sell me shit Granted, Postman had quite a lot more tools in its box for scripting, testing, sharing etc. but I didn't need those. Insomnia has got a bit fatter since then, but it remains more responsive than Postman was.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    You asked how it's different then stated how it's different. Because it's OSS they didn't feel the need to bog down a perfectly functional product to drive a valuation up. It's a carbon copy of what Postman started as.
  - phgn 5y ago
    That's what I want. A local-only Postman without too many features or configuration overhead. Insomnia is almost perfect for that.
lovedaddy 5y ago
The latest updates from httpie have an insomnia type rest client workspace thing. https://httpie.io/product https://httpie.io/product
- piokoch 5y ago
  This is some invite only software, am I missing something? I couldn't use it right away, I was asked to join waitlist.
  - jkbr 5y ago
    HTTPie for Web & Desktop is in private beta. We’re shipping updates weekly and inviting people from the waitlist every day. As soon as we’ve tackled the few remaining things on our roadmap and polished some rough edges, it’ll become publicly available.
danuker 5y ago
> when it was a simple browser extension You can download packages of extensions. I would recommend that you do it for the ones you love. But the browser APIs are constantly changing, forcing you to keep running in order not to fall behind.
eatonphil 5y ago
I'm building a desktop app that lets you query HTTP APIs but also databases and files. So definitely something you can use as a simple curl GUI. The big benefit of this tool though is that you can script and graph results as well. Always happy for any feedback! https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation
sillyquiet 5y ago
Same story here. Postman just got too feature-rich for my blood. curl + bloomRPC + graphiQL covers all my bases nowadays.
chin7an 5y ago
Paw[0] is a pretty good native macOS option, at least for now. They were acquired sometime last year by RapidAPI[1], and since have released electron based versions of their app for Linux and Windows. I’m really hoping they don’t go the 1Password route and kill their native macOS product to move everyone to the cross-platform one. [0] https://paw.cloud/ https://paw.cloud/ [1] https://rapidapi.com/ https://rapidapi.com/
- jim180 5y ago
  No, we are not gonna kill native macOS app![0] [0] I'm lead developer for macOS app :)
  - 9dev 5y ago
    We own licenses for our developers too, and plan on buying more. Please, please, please, don't screw us over and change course later on. We really like Paw, and not being based on Electron is the major selling point :)
  - lukevp 5y ago
    It seems unrealistic long term for any company to maintain one native app and an electron app across other platforms. Spotify did this for a while, but they eventually forced everyone onto the electron app. Something to keep in mind.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      > It seems unrealistic long term for any company to maintain one native app and an electron app across other platforms Not sure if it's more or less unrealistic to have one native app per platform. > Spotify did this for a while, but they eventually forced everyone onto the electron app I don't think (but someone correct me if I'm wrong please) Spotify has ever been a Electron app. If I recall correctly they are indeed embedding Chromium but they are doing their own custom binding (possibly via CEF), not via Electron.
      - 5y ago
mattbuilds 5y ago
I used to use Postman but now I prefer to just build my own scripts in Python. I use the requests library and can setup things however I want.
- anyfactor 5y ago
  Same here. I am not sure where would I even use postman for. I essentially would wait 3-5 minutes to have postman initialized, be greeted with a dialogue box for an update or something, drop a json file for the headers and skim through the output. But it takes seconds to get up and running with requests-html. And it can do anything Postman can do and more. I have no idea how people in organizations use postman though.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    > I am not sure where would I even use postman for. It's really handy for generating test suites to hand to people who don't necessarily have the skills to write Python / node / whatever code. Have worked at places where certain changes needed a Postman collection alongside for people to manually verify that it works. (Also handy for un-coder people to make test suites, obvs.) (Also handy as a quick-and-dirty "view this data via the API" when you don't yet have a web UI etc.)
    - Raidion 5y ago
      I've worked in a place where test suites started in postman because of the lack of skill in QA. For us, the fact that you end up writing "code" in postman meant it had a learning curve anyway, so it was a really short sighted win. For everyone smart enough to write postman code, especially postman code that leverages the scripts and storing variables, a simple test project set up by a dev is going to be very worthwhile. Postman doesn't have a linter or compiler, and it doesn't enable easy viewing of changes in source control because it's just one big json file.
robofanatic 5y ago
I wonder how much of that was driven by the silicon valley VC culture. You won't get funding if you don't show growth and "innovation", which means catering to all kinds of users resulting into a bloated product with lots of bells and whistles.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Incidently, httpie is getting a GUI: https://github.com/httpie/desktop https://github.com/httpie/desktop
- skrebbel 5y ago
  And VC funding!
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Oh, that's really unfortunate, I really like httpie. I wonder how long time it'll take for them to end up trying to extract as much value from each user as possible...
    - stavros 5y ago
      > I wonder how long time it'll take for them to end up trying to extract as much value from each user as possible... As long as it'll take for the investment documents to be signed.
    - jkbr 5y ago
      HTTPie founder here. These are valid concerns. There are two parts to this: 1/ What happens with HTTPie for Terminal, and 2/ how HTTPie for Web & Desktop and the overall platform will look like. 1/ HTTPie for Terminal will always be open-source and obviously free. The difference is that now we’re able to pay a talented developer to work on the project full-time (the recent 3.0 release is a result of that). 2/ We’re building a new platform with the same principles that made HTTPie for Terminal successful in mind: uncompromising simplicity, focus on productivity, and delightful user experience. We’re in the same space as Postman, but the idea is to be anything like. We’re striving to become what Linear is to Jira, Vercel to AWS, Figma to Adobe, etc. That is, to offer a much simpler and more focused product. Premium services for companies will be a natural extension of the single-player mode, and all incentives will be aligned in a way that doesn’t cannibalize the core experience.
  - revscat 5y ago
    Source? I really hope this isn't the case. Fucking capitalists kill everything.
hadrien01 5y ago
I just use the HTTP Client from IntelliJ/Rider. It's text only, you can use variables (for Auth for example), and I can copy/paste queries from Fiddler Classic/my browser or to colleagues.
theFluke 5y ago
If you're on macOS, Auxl (https://auxl.io https://auxl.io) is another option to try. Support for gRPC should be coming soon. Disclosure: I am the author.
lucideer 5y ago
I used to like Postman until it locked me out of my locally-stored data while I was offline (testing my own applications on localhost) for an extended period , I found out that it phones home constantly (cannot be disabled) & locks you out if it fails. The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal.
- kaszanka 5y ago
  This sounds unbelievable but it seems to be true? https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/10254 https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/10...
  - bathtub365 5y ago
    I don’t see anything in this issue that I’d characterize as > The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal. The issue is still open with no response from the developers that mentions security reasons.
    - cloverich 5y ago
      Its in issue in the sibling comment. The suggested work-around is to not sign in at all.
      - lucideer 5y ago
        For further context: I'm not sure if this has changed but at that time signing in seemed* to be required (there's some discussions in the ticket about confusion in the UI about this so in retrospect UX dark patterns were likely at play). However, while it may have been possible to make ad hoc requests without an account, it didn't seem to be possible to save request collections locally without sign in.
        a85 5y ago
ironmagma 5y ago
I’ve found Hurl to be quite usable. https://hurl.dev/ https://hurl.dev/
magicalhippo 5y ago
I found SoapUI when I had to develop some SOAP services, but these days it also does REST etc just fine. For someone like me who just does this occasionally I found it rather useful. [1]: https://www.soapui.org https://www.soapui.org
wackget 5y ago
RESTER on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/

by paozac 5y ago

sbmthakur 5y ago

> I basically used it as a curl gui. I just use Browser's Network tab for that nowadays. CORS can be a trouble at times, but that can be avoided with a few tweaks.

dewey 5y ago
I think the killer feature for these separate tools is usually that you can easily do a right click -> "copy as curl" in the network inspector, then import it in Postman/Paw and then tweak parameters / add headers there. This is not really possible in the browser network tools.
- nerdite 5y ago
  I take that curl command to https://curlconverter.com https://curlconverter.com And get Python that I can start iterating on. They have lots of languages. I used to use Postman but the clarity of the code is so much easier to see what’s happening vs postman imo.
- panzerklein 5y ago
  It seems pretty easy with Firefox - there's "Edit and resend" in the context menu of every request.
  - dewey 5y ago
    And then you accidentally refresh or close the tab and everything is gone. I usually use specific requests over many days if I'm reverse engineering something so having these available, sorted in folders for me is important. Of course for other uses cases it might be fine to have them live in the browser.
    - ROARosen 5y ago
      Se above. On MS Edge chromium you can enable to save the requests and even saved environments
- ROARosen 5y ago
  On the on Microsoft Edge chromium you can can enable an "edit and resend" feature save the requests to "Collections" and create request environments.
  - sbmthakur 5y ago
    I wonder if a such a feature can be added in Chrome/Firefox with an extension.

tluyben2 5y ago

It is also buggy, resource hog and instable. I use it on Ubuntu and os x m1 and I often have to kill it because it stops accepting any inputs or it ate all memory (and cpu after that when you click anything). Hoppscotsch and others are better now: I guess they wanted way too much too fast (I did not check but I suppose they got VC money?)?

quambene 5y ago
Can confirm. Unfortunately, Postman is too resource-hungry (on Ubuntu). Launching is taking a while as well. I have to admit I'm quite surprised that VS Code (which is also an electron app) is relatively fast and resource-sensitive. Having open a few applications in my daily workflow, moderate resource consumption is getting an important selling point for me.

adam_arthur 5y ago

The UX has gotten noticeably worse for me. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but now you have to setup a project and name things before you can actually start issuing requests. And I found the whole experience a bit confusing in terms of user flow

cyral 5y ago
It really needs some love in the UX department. There are so many icons and toolbars it is hard to understand where to find things or why they are placed where they are.
ljm 5y ago
New law: Any novel product with VC funding will inevitably grow a vestigial CMS.

nileshtrivedi 5y ago

Try Insomnia or Hoppskotch.

oweiler 5y ago
How is Insomnia any different? It's basically an OSS carbon copy of Postman.
- piaste 5y ago
  I switched to Insomnia about a year ago for two main reasons: - Didn't choke when having ~50 request 'tabs' open - Didn't try to sell me shit Granted, Postman had quite a lot more tools in its box for scripting, testing, sharing etc. but I didn't need those. Insomnia has got a bit fatter since then, but it remains more responsive than Postman was.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  You asked how it's different then stated how it's different. Because it's OSS they didn't feel the need to bog down a perfectly functional product to drive a valuation up. It's a carbon copy of what Postman started as.
- phgn 5y ago
  That's what I want. A local-only Postman without too many features or configuration overhead. Insomnia is almost perfect for that.

lovedaddy 5y ago

The latest updates from httpie have an insomnia type rest client workspace thing. https://httpie.io/product https://httpie.io/product

piokoch 5y ago
This is some invite only software, am I missing something? I couldn't use it right away, I was asked to join waitlist.
- jkbr 5y ago
  HTTPie for Web & Desktop is in private beta. We’re shipping updates weekly and inviting people from the waitlist every day. As soon as we’ve tackled the few remaining things on our roadmap and polished some rough edges, it’ll become publicly available.

danuker 5y ago

> when it was a simple browser extension You can download packages of extensions. I would recommend that you do it for the ones you love. But the browser APIs are constantly changing, forcing you to keep running in order not to fall behind.

eatonphil 5y ago

I'm building a desktop app that lets you query HTTP APIs but also databases and files. So definitely something you can use as a simple curl GUI. The big benefit of this tool though is that you can script and graph results as well. Always happy for any feedback! https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation

sillyquiet 5y ago

Same story here. Postman just got too feature-rich for my blood. curl + bloomRPC + graphiQL covers all my bases nowadays.

chin7an 5y ago

Paw[0] is a pretty good native macOS option, at least for now. They were acquired sometime last year by RapidAPI[1], and since have released electron based versions of their app for Linux and Windows. I’m really hoping they don’t go the 1Password route and kill their native macOS product to move everyone to the cross-platform one. [0] https://paw.cloud/ https://paw.cloud/ [1] https://rapidapi.com/ https://rapidapi.com/

jim180 5y ago
No, we are not gonna kill native macOS app![0] [0] I'm lead developer for macOS app :)
- 9dev 5y ago
  We own licenses for our developers too, and plan on buying more. Please, please, please, don't screw us over and change course later on. We really like Paw, and not being based on Electron is the major selling point :)
- lukevp 5y ago
  It seems unrealistic long term for any company to maintain one native app and an electron app across other platforms. Spotify did this for a while, but they eventually forced everyone onto the electron app. Something to keep in mind.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > It seems unrealistic long term for any company to maintain one native app and an electron app across other platforms Not sure if it's more or less unrealistic to have one native app per platform. > Spotify did this for a while, but they eventually forced everyone onto the electron app I don't think (but someone correct me if I'm wrong please) Spotify has ever been a Electron app. If I recall correctly they are indeed embedding Chromium but they are doing their own custom binding (possibly via CEF), not via Electron.
    - 5y ago

mattbuilds 5y ago

I used to use Postman but now I prefer to just build my own scripts in Python. I use the requests library and can setup things however I want.

anyfactor 5y ago
Same here. I am not sure where would I even use postman for. I essentially would wait 3-5 minutes to have postman initialized, be greeted with a dialogue box for an update or something, drop a json file for the headers and skim through the output. But it takes seconds to get up and running with requests-html. And it can do anything Postman can do and more. I have no idea how people in organizations use postman though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > I am not sure where would I even use postman for. It's really handy for generating test suites to hand to people who don't necessarily have the skills to write Python / node / whatever code. Have worked at places where certain changes needed a Postman collection alongside for people to manually verify that it works. (Also handy for un-coder people to make test suites, obvs.) (Also handy as a quick-and-dirty "view this data via the API" when you don't yet have a web UI etc.)
  - Raidion 5y ago
    I've worked in a place where test suites started in postman because of the lack of skill in QA. For us, the fact that you end up writing "code" in postman meant it had a learning curve anyway, so it was a really short sighted win. For everyone smart enough to write postman code, especially postman code that leverages the scripts and storing variables, a simple test project set up by a dev is going to be very worthwhile. Postman doesn't have a linter or compiler, and it doesn't enable easy viewing of changes in source control because it's just one big json file.

robofanatic 5y ago

I wonder how much of that was driven by the silicon valley VC culture. You won't get funding if you don't show growth and "innovation", which means catering to all kinds of users resulting into a bloated product with lots of bells and whistles.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Incidently, httpie is getting a GUI: https://github.com/httpie/desktop https://github.com/httpie/desktop

skrebbel 5y ago
And VC funding!
- capableweb 5y ago
  Oh, that's really unfortunate, I really like httpie. I wonder how long time it'll take for them to end up trying to extract as much value from each user as possible...
  - stavros 5y ago
    > I wonder how long time it'll take for them to end up trying to extract as much value from each user as possible... As long as it'll take for the investment documents to be signed.
  - jkbr 5y ago
    HTTPie founder here. These are valid concerns. There are two parts to this: 1/ What happens with HTTPie for Terminal, and 2/ how HTTPie for Web & Desktop and the overall platform will look like. 1/ HTTPie for Terminal will always be open-source and obviously free. The difference is that now we’re able to pay a talented developer to work on the project full-time (the recent 3.0 release is a result of that). 2/ We’re building a new platform with the same principles that made HTTPie for Terminal successful in mind: uncompromising simplicity, focus on productivity, and delightful user experience. We’re in the same space as Postman, but the idea is to be anything like. We’re striving to become what Linear is to Jira, Vercel to AWS, Figma to Adobe, etc. That is, to offer a much simpler and more focused product. Premium services for companies will be a natural extension of the single-player mode, and all incentives will be aligned in a way that doesn’t cannibalize the core experience.
- revscat 5y ago
  Source? I really hope this isn't the case. Fucking capitalists kill everything.

hadrien01 5y ago

I just use the HTTP Client from IntelliJ/Rider. It's text only, you can use variables (for Auth for example), and I can copy/paste queries from Fiddler Classic/my browser or to colleagues.

theFluke 5y ago

If you're on macOS, Auxl (https://auxl.io https://auxl.io) is another option to try. Support for gRPC should be coming soon. Disclosure: I am the author.

lucideer 5y ago

I used to like Postman until it locked me out of my locally-stored data while I was offline (testing my own applications on localhost) for an extended period , I found out that it phones home constantly (cannot be disabled) & locks you out if it fails. The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal.

kaszanka 5y ago
This sounds unbelievable but it seems to be true? https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/10254 https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/10...
- bathtub365 5y ago
  I don’t see anything in this issue that I’d characterize as > The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal. The issue is still open with no response from the developers that mentions security reasons.
  - cloverich 5y ago
    Its in issue in the sibling comment. The suggested work-around is to not sign in at all.
    - lucideer 5y ago
      For further context: I'm not sure if this has changed but at that time signing in seemed* to be required (there's some discussions in the ticket about confusion in the UI about this so in retrospect UX dark patterns were likely at play). However, while it may have been possible to make ad hoc requests without an account, it didn't seem to be possible to save request collections locally without sign in.
      - a85 5y ago

ironmagma 5y ago

I’ve found Hurl to be quite usable. https://hurl.dev/ https://hurl.dev/

magicalhippo 5y ago

I found SoapUI when I had to develop some SOAP services, but these days it also does REST etc just fine. For someone like me who just does this occasionally I found it rather useful. [1]: https://www.soapui.org https://www.soapui.org

wackget 5y ago

RESTER on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/