Postman

Notes on Postman for APIs.

A GET request is for consuming data from the API.

A POST request is for writing data to the API.

Best practice is to send data in the body of the request, which a normal web browser won't let you do, thus you install Postman.

Postman is nothing more than a web browser, but on steroids, so it can expose a lot more functionality than a normal web browser.

An API will have API documentation that explains how to use it.

Use of Postman

API: https://simple-books-api.glitch.me/

To start sending requests:
Postman / Workspaces / My Workspace / + Tab

You can save your API Request to a Collection.

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You can highlight the domain portion of the url and "Set As Variable" will pop-up. e.g. for

https://simple-books-api.glitch.me/status

You can highlight:

simple-books-api.glitch.me

and set it to a variable called baseUrl with scope of the Collection, giving:

https://{{baseUrl}}/status

Useful in case the baseUrl changes.

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See reference at 6:25 in this video.

Postman Tutorial for Beginners with API Testing Example by guru99

Learn Postman with this Postman Beginner's Tutorial

Authentication

Is commonly performed by OAuth using an Access Token.

Variables in Postman

You can use variables in Postman, and they are put in double curly brackets:

{{variable}}

Test Tools for Postman

Postman Monitors

Newman

Jenkins CI Server

Resources

RapidAPI - Discover, evaluate, and integrate with any API. RapidAPI is the world’s largest API marketplace with over a million developers and ten thousand APIs.

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