
In this case, the request is accepting a json response, and also specifies a custom headers specific to this application for the api key. Then following an empty line, the request headers are specified in key: value format. The request is specified with any of the usual HTTP verbs, followed by the resource endpoint. If following along with your project's API, replace with appropriate endpoint: # Get all subscriptions GET Accept: application/vnd.api+json Myapp-Tenant-Api-Key: thekeyĬomments can be added by starting a line with #. To add the first request, edit the file as follows. Think of this as a Collection in Postman as it supports multiple requests. For example, I'm going to be testing the subscriptions endpoint on my project so will create a file http/subscription.http.

Now create a file in the folder and give it an. Getting StartedĪfter installing the extension, create a new folder somewhere in your project such as requests or http (doesn't matter what you call it, it's just for organization to have a single place for all the "collections").
VSCODE POSTMAN ALTERNATIVE CODE
So what to use instead? I've been using this VS Code REST Client extension for nearly a year and am very happy with it, as it solves all the pain points I've had with Postman. But this is not the same as the git you'd be using for version control on the project.

From the docs it looks like a proprietary system based roughly on Github PRs, accessible via the Postman GUI. Note that the paid teams account does support version control, which I haven't used. " the Postman collection at the same git commit hash. If you have to go back to a previous point in time to fix a bug or track down where a regression occurred in the project, it's impossible to "git checkout. The API requests will evolve as the project evolves.
VSCODE POSTMAN ALTERNATIVE FREE
Version ControlĪnother thing I find irritating about working with Postman is lack of version control, at least, on the free tier.

This may not be desirable, especially if the company you're working for already has an approved secrets manager such as LastPass, 1Password, or Vault. But when working on a company project, this effectively makes Postman a secrets manager, especially if storing tokens for staging and production, or other environments that may be publicly accessible. For a personal side project, this may not be a big deal. When using Postman, this gets saved as part of the request (or environment if using variables). Speaking of trust, many APIs require authentication such as a username/password or token provided on each request. While this is certainly convenient, it does raise the 3rd party trust issue as mentioned earlier. Or Postman encourages account creation, and then your collections and environments are backed up and synced on their servers.
VSCODE POSTMAN ALTERNATIVE MANUAL
When working on the free tier, collections and environments can be saved to an external json file with the Export feature, but that requires manual work. BackupsĪs you add more and more requests/collections/environments for your API, you will come to depend on Postman and would lose a lot of work if the data were lost.

If this is an internal API or something proprietary being built for a client, this means trusting a 3rd party (Postman, the company) with the API, and environment information. This requires a paid Teams account on Postman. However, if working on a team, it will require being able to share the collection(s) of HTTP requests and environments configuration (dev, qa, staging, prod, etc.) to test your API. If you're working by yourself on a project, then the Postman free tier can be sufficient as there's no need to share collections with anyone else. It would be nicer to stay in the editor where I can continue to use my preferred keyboard shortcuts, fonts and themes. This requires a context switch, which creates just enough friction to make me a little irritated. Postman is a separate application that needs to be downloaded and installed, and is separate from the text editor/IDE I use for development (which is VS Code). The following is just my perspective using it as a developer. In fact its very good, feature rich, constantly evolving, and certainly solves a lot of problems for a lot of teams and companies. However, I'd like to share another tool, a VS Code extension that is working better for me, as an alternative to Postman.īut first, why not just stick with Postman? Below I've outlined a few pain points that have caused me to seek out an alternative.ĭisclaimer This is not at all to suggest that Postman is a bad product. Postman is a very popular choice and I used to reach for this all the time. If you've been doing web development for any length of time, you've probably built or worked on an HTTP REST style API and needed a REST Client to test it.
