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geophph

a day ago

Bruno for GUI Posting for TUI YMMV depending on how much you need out of the client.

That said, I’ve found Postman extension for VSCode to be preferable to their GUI

tra3

a day ago

fzf + curl.

- Easy to find things in your shell history with fzf

- curl supports everything you may need HTTP-wise.

One of my favourite curl snippets:

    curl -vvv 'https://google.com' \
    -w "==============\n\n | dnslookup: %{time_namelookup}\n | connect: %{time_connect}\n | appconnect: %{time_appconnect}\n | pretransfer: %{time_pretransfer}\n | starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}\n | total: %{time_tot
    al}\n | size: %{size_download}\n | HTTPCode=%{http_code}\n\n"

which results in this little table after all the actual HTTP output:

    | dnslookup: 0.033616
    | connect: 0.234668
    | appconnect: 0.512112
    | pretransfer: 0.277686
    | starttransfer: 0.307353
    | total: 0.308548
    | size: 220

I kid, but only a little bit. What does Postman offer?

solardev

21 hours ago

> What does Postman offer?

Good clients of this sort (Postman, yes, but also its competitors) will often offer some mix of:

- Better secrets management (they don't end up in your shell history); not necessarily encrypted but usually something like an internal .env file

- Organization into folders

- Sharing and collaboration with teammates

- Import/export to/from external API specs

- Recording example responses, both successes and failures

- The ability to chain together several requests with data passed them them (e.g. create new user, login as that user, fetch a request as that user, validate response contains json.data.blah_blah[0].blahblah

- Export/import to and from curl commands, JS fetch calls, etc.

- All of that in a GUI that is easy to use and teach

They are invaluable if you have teams working together on API designs or testing. They can be very helpful for quickly tinkering with and debugging API responses without having to write a bunch of unit tests or scripts (where you might not necessarily want the overhead of dealing with curl commands manually or writing basic HTTP calls over and over in a programming language).

It's really a big time saver... in the teams that I've been on, it lets us create folders full of actual API endpoint examples to give to frontend devs who can see what the backend is supposed to do when it succeeds, along with example responses for different failure states. It makes developing a functional app a lot easier than trying to parse all that out from a shitty Confluence page or whatever.