This blog post is going to be a short and sweet appreciation post for Postman. I have been doing a fair amount of backend projects lately to work on routes, manipulating data, and just general API building. While working on these projects the one tool that I have found the most invaluable is Postman.
Postman is a client that allows you to quickly build and send REST, SOAP, and GraphQL requests. When I work on new projects my process generally looks something like this: 1) Draw out models, attributes, and relationships on a whiteboard. 2) Create and run table migrations. 3) Add seed data. 4) And lastly, I like to work on the routes starting with basic GET requests and working on from there.
Now, testing GET routes is not too bad in the browser. It really just involves navigating to the URL and then using some tool like JSONView to format the data to make it easy to interpret. Postman does this too, but it gives us a lot more control and also gives us the opportunity to save the response data to a file if we need.
Postman really becomes useful though when we start hitting other types of requests like POST or DELETE requests. Postman allows us to edit the request header and body with the information we want to use for these requests without having to write any code, and the best part is we can save those requests so we can run them over and over and over to test our API.
I also find it incredibly useful when working on frontend projects that use an existing API, because I can create a lot of sample requests and know exactly what the data is going to look like when it is returned to me.
Postman has allowed me to easily test the API’s I am working on and by the time I get to the front end there is no guess work as to what data I am working with or how it is formatted. It is a huge time saver and by far one of my favorites tools to use when developing.
More on Postman and JSONView, the other browser tool I mentioned, can be found here: