You could technically do this with netcat, or using a language specific approach, or another tool like wiremock. It can also get folk thinking a bit more about their mocks/contracts than they would be otherwise because it's just part of the existing toolchain. Having it built into the system which already has your open api specs, has SWE familiarity and is already there will often make this win out. With that said, sometimes 'technically the best' looses out to what's immediately available. There's a bunch of ways to do mock servers and I wouldn't say postman is technically the best ( personal preference is stuff like wiremock). Having a standardized way of handling this with the ability to extend it if needed can become a massive time-saver. At this point you're really in the realm of writing small-medium custom scripts to wrap the auth handling, save the tokens, refresh. Creating a way of handling auth which can be shared across a team becomes even more of a pain, especially if we're talking about auto refresh and the like. Handling auth in curl can be a real pain. This I think is where some of the power of postman really begins to shine (and tools like it). So postman has pretty rich support for a few auth types (api key, no auth, oauth 1.0 & 2.0, signatures, ntlm etc). You could use the openapi client generator to produce a curl command. As with a lot of this stuff, you /can/ do this without postman. Especially with the sharing capabilities which I'll touch on under the team side of things. Even as openapi/swagger docs on steroids with a richer http client this gets pretty powerful. This combined the the 'UI alternative to curl' really gives a lot of the foundational power for the other postman features. It's a pretty solid one, especially if you integrate with the API during your build process to version/upload the API specs. This will be the most commonly pointed at benefit of postman (and others like it) in my opinion. The ability to import openapi/swagger/protobuf (as of recently) and generate collections I'd say that the UI on top of curl is more accurately viewed as an alternative to things like jetbrains's build in http client. For folk not familiar with curl there's a lot of gotchas when it comes to escaping, handling auth, etc. For simple get/post requests, this is definitely the case. This is the most basic usage and a lot of the of other functionality is extensions of this. This is kind of expanding on koeffiezets comment.įor me postman's 'value add' can be broken down into three areas. With that said we use it pretty heavily so I might be able to provide some insights. I find the user experience to be counter intuitive compared to the likes of insomnia. I’d pay per major version or do the IntelliJ perpetual fallback if it came to it, but I’ve never once been bait and switched (looking at you Tower2).To preface this, I'm not a massive fan of postman. I paid them $50, probably 6 years ago now, and have never been forced to pay them another dime. I forgot to mention their license is still a lifetime license. A great combination of simple just get out of the way and advanced automation strategies. The Teams version, which requires a monthly sub kinda/sorta mimics a git style branch strategy for merging different members changes and handles the team problem pretty well.Īll in all though, it is absolutely and BY FAR the best request tool I’ve ever used. paw file is binary and doesn’t do well checked into source control if you’ve got more than one person using it. This could very well be my lack of knowledge, though I feel like I know the tool well. Each request requires the auth config, but this is solved by just copying an existing request and starting from that. I still can’t figure out how to make it “use the same auth scheme” for every single request globally. I’ve only got really a couple of nits with the stand-alone version. Most importantly, it just works, and it works well and quickly, with pretty much any auth scheme I’ve ever had to deal with. You can extract values from one response body to use as a variable in another request, the built in features go on and on- and there’s a decent extension ecosystem/write your own. It can generate code snippets and cURL requests. It can consume swagger/openapi docs and generate calls. I’ve been using it for a long time and I’d happily pay $100 for it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |