5 ms·

There are lots of things that you can do easily with postman but would be difficult with a CLI tool.

by abritishguy 12y ago

SixSigma 12y ago
I doubt that completely, citation needed.
- felipesabino 12y ago
  I agree that CLI are awesome and you can do way more using it that with any other UI (specially a web one), but taking HTTP API testing as an example, postman lets you do a bunch of stuff that are so simple with one click that I can see some people not wanting to dive in the CLI world, write a bunch of stuff and also having to store environment data for requests with extra files (I think thats where the 'difficult' from the previous comment comes along, but that's just me guessing...) Taking that into consideration, Postman's web interface lets you - See all the request history that you can easily reply any of them with one click - Save requests and share them (including a collection of requests) - Have and share environment variables to change, for example, between production and development API urls, password, params, etc (I know, a CLI also lets you do that, but it soooo simple to just select and preview the environment variables from the list) - easily handle oAuth and other authentication forms out of the box But you will suffer (a lot) trying to use Postman to - Handle binary input/outputs - Stream responses - Handle cookies So, depending on what your day to day problems are you should use a different tool... Oh, and I didn't know about HTTPie, thanks for sharing :)
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    None of those things are intractable, I have had scripts handle them all. On top of that, writing scripts educates you on how such systems work. It really isn't challenging.
    - servercobra 12y ago
      Sure. I can script a lot of things and have learned a ton by doing that. But when I'm focused on making an API or debugging one, I don't want to spend the time writing a script if there is a readily available tool that does what I need. I can better spend the time improving the app.
    - lttlrck 12y ago
      Care to share them? It sounds like a lot of people would like to use them instead of Postman.
- snikch 12y ago
  I find your response to be really arrogant. Postman is an easily installed Chrome extension that can be supplied to everyone on your team, regardless of skill level. Requiring a cli isn't as easy as a one click install - there's dependencies (Python etc.) that are required which, while easy for many, aren't as simple for a lot of web developers - especially those who focus on front end development and may just need an easy tool for inspecting API requests they need to make. There's still a wide market for GUI based programs, and Postman is an excellent extension that I've used for years (even though I'm a CLI guy myself). It's always there, easy to use, and powerful to boot. Edit 1: Grammar / Spelling
  - andkon 12y ago
    Totally agreed. Another benefit (or set of benefits): when you've got 5 CLI tabs open already, and you're trying to remember where your curl response went, it's nice to know Postman has (a) history of recent requests in a readily clickable list, (b) a different window that's easily accessible, and (c) any saved headers and tokens that I can otherwise never remember.
    - SixSigma 12y ago
      Like Tesla said "if you thought a bit more, you wouldn't have to sweat so much" All of those would be eliminated with preparation and planning. And the results would be better quality than ad hoc poking with Bash
      - untog 12y ago
        Yeah, if we all prepared and planned perfectly for absolutely everything we do in life then we probably would need less assistance. Meanwhile, in the real world, sometimes things have to be done fast and messily.
        SixSigma 12y ago
        Testing http:// http:// services is not one of those things
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mlni 12y ago
Chrome dev tools make testing RESTful backends with curl very easy: right-click on a request in network panel and choose "Copy as curl". Priceless little gem.
- techaddict009 12y ago
  Can you explain this? I would really be happy if there is any tool which give option "Copy as curl" !
  - threepointone 12y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/sBGycyF.png https://i.imgur.com/sBGycyF.png (would give - curl 'https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css?Iufnib6nCakqGh6wo0m6' https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css?Iufnib6nCakqGh6wo0m6' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36' --compressed )

There are lots of things that you can do easily with postman but would be difficult with a CLI tool.

SixSigma 12y ago

I doubt that completely, citation needed.

felipesabino 12y ago
I agree that CLI are awesome and you can do way more using it that with any other UI (specially a web one), but taking HTTP API testing as an example, postman lets you do a bunch of stuff that are so simple with one click that I can see some people not wanting to dive in the CLI world, write a bunch of stuff and also having to store environment data for requests with extra files (I think thats where the 'difficult' from the previous comment comes along, but that's just me guessing...) Taking that into consideration, Postman's web interface lets you - See all the request history that you can easily reply any of them with one click - Save requests and share them (including a collection of requests) - Have and share environment variables to change, for example, between production and development API urls, password, params, etc (I know, a CLI also lets you do that, but it soooo simple to just select and preview the environment variables from the list) - easily handle oAuth and other authentication forms out of the box But you will suffer (a lot) trying to use Postman to - Handle binary input/outputs - Stream responses - Handle cookies So, depending on what your day to day problems are you should use a different tool... Oh, and I didn't know about HTTPie, thanks for sharing :)
- SixSigma 12y ago
  None of those things are intractable, I have had scripts handle them all. On top of that, writing scripts educates you on how such systems work. It really isn't challenging.
  - servercobra 12y ago
    Sure. I can script a lot of things and have learned a ton by doing that. But when I'm focused on making an API or debugging one, I don't want to spend the time writing a script if there is a readily available tool that does what I need. I can better spend the time improving the app.
  - lttlrck 12y ago
    Care to share them? It sounds like a lot of people would like to use them instead of Postman.
snikch 12y ago
I find your response to be really arrogant. Postman is an easily installed Chrome extension that can be supplied to everyone on your team, regardless of skill level. Requiring a cli isn't as easy as a one click install - there's dependencies (Python etc.) that are required which, while easy for many, aren't as simple for a lot of web developers - especially those who focus on front end development and may just need an easy tool for inspecting API requests they need to make. There's still a wide market for GUI based programs, and Postman is an excellent extension that I've used for years (even though I'm a CLI guy myself). It's always there, easy to use, and powerful to boot. Edit 1: Grammar / Spelling
- andkon 12y ago
  Totally agreed. Another benefit (or set of benefits): when you've got 5 CLI tabs open already, and you're trying to remember where your curl response went, it's nice to know Postman has (a) history of recent requests in a readily clickable list, (b) a different window that's easily accessible, and (c) any saved headers and tokens that I can otherwise never remember.
  - SixSigma 12y ago
    Like Tesla said "if you thought a bit more, you wouldn't have to sweat so much" All of those would be eliminated with preparation and planning. And the results would be better quality than ad hoc poking with Bash
    - untog 12y ago
      Yeah, if we all prepared and planned perfectly for absolutely everything we do in life then we probably would need less assistance. Meanwhile, in the real world, sometimes things have to be done fast and messily.
      - SixSigma 12y ago
        Testing http:// http:// services is not one of those things
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mlni 12y ago

Chrome dev tools make testing RESTful backends with curl very easy: right-click on a request in network panel and choose "Copy as curl". Priceless little gem.

techaddict009 12y ago
Can you explain this? I would really be happy if there is any tool which give option "Copy as curl" !
- threepointone 12y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/sBGycyF.png https://i.imgur.com/sBGycyF.png (would give - curl 'https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css?Iufnib6nCakqGh6wo0m6' https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css?Iufnib6nCakqGh6wo0m6' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36' --compressed )