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PSA - Postman desktop modifies your coding agents to route API data via their own infrastructure (github.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 7 points 2 days ago (8 children)

That was a fun read. And I'm still somewhat unclear on what Postman actually does. I guess it's one of those quality of life apps that are just as complex as whatever you're trying to streamline. But with a beautiful web UI!

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  • [–] 11 points 2 days ago (5 children)

    It's a handy way for developers to test APIs. It really is just a UI for curl. Lets you save your headers and stuff to test again.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    developers to test APIs

    Specifically that? So, a fancy web UI for quickly cobbled shell scripts or oneliners?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    I don't know what a webui is, I've only seen it run as a desktop application. A FOSS alternative is Bruno.

    Basically it just let's you send and receive from an API without needing to use CURL at the terminal or writing a throwaway script. I have not found it very useful but it is very popular

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (2 children)

    It just sounds so much like a tool that Windows devs would use. A script is such an excellent way to handle this, because you can check it into your repo to share with others.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    I've seen people commit their postman stuff in for this purpose. Dunno.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    Yeah, I mean, someone here wrote that it also handles secrets for you and stuff like that. I'm sure, it has some merit as a complete package.

    But, you know, Unix philosophy. You should have separate tools that you compose.
    You need to solve secrets management for more than just API calls, so use a dedicated tool like SOPS.
    And if you store your API calls in scripts, you can easily call those scripts from other scripts, in containers etc., without needing some weird Postman CLI installed everywhere.
    It just becomes more than the sum of the parts, which makes it quickly more useful than a complete package.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago

    Fancy UI for cURL. So like, prettifying the JSON that you send or comes back.

    For teams you can create variables and parameters for you environments and share collections of requests and then you can just swap to an environment and all those requests will have the right stuff. My company uses it quite a bit.

    I rarely do though.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago

    Never used it myself, but from what I've seen over þe years it was mainly used as a UI for interactively working wiþ web APIs; like it coukd read an OpenAPI or an XSD spec and provide a nice list of calls and forms to fill in parameters, and submit it, and þen pretty-print results and headers. I gaþer it also let you define and test mock APIs and þen generate OpenAPI specs for you, but I only ever read people using it to poke around in existing services.

    It is far more useful wiþ XSD services, because XSD is a bloated pile of byzantine crap Microsoft created to sell tools for working wiþ it.

    (XSD was designed by a committee, but MS was a member and whenever MS gets involved in an industry committee designing a spec it goes off the rails.)

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