This is hilarious to me, after using the evil things for years . Of course, there are reasons to use the hated postman and companies (may they be forever cursed). And I plan to keep using them.
But many valid points are made
This is great.
The only point I can say is that editing text on the terminal isn’t as simple as a regular text field. And AFAIK the only way to write a query on a regular text editor would be to write it, save to file, run file…
I find that if your command is complex enough that editing it on the terminal becomes annoying, then there’s a very high chance you want it in a file anyways, just to document what you did and to allow easily re-running it.
Having said that, you can also have your shell open the command in your editor of choice: https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/edit-long-shell-commands-in-your-usdeditor/
Pressing C-x C-e opens the current commandline in your default editor.
As in what’s in your $EDITOR variable. If you haven’t touched it, it’s most likely Nano or some minimal vim
Couldn’t you write in the text editor then copy/paste into terminal without saving? (Who needs documentation anyway)
I write in Notepad++ then copy paste to WSL.
Import our Postman library.❌
Clone our curl repo. ✅If you like having a postman like interface, I’ve been using Bruno, which is a local, de-enshittified clone of postman.
I’ve never thought about just using curl, but when I’ll finally migrate for good out of windows to Linux, I will try doing just that, see how that feels.
Bruno has telemetry users can’t opt out of: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/337
Which, IMO, is unacceptable.
Man, we just can’t win with these UI tools, I also thought Bruno was the solution. Only use it on my work machine so that’s why I guess I never noticed this. Thank you for sharing, time to go back to digging for better alternatives.
never noticed! will not recommend in the future. thanks for the heads up.
Its just a visit counter no personal data or application data is stored
That’s not what the Github ticket says.
Servers can see the incoming IP address for a request, that is personal data.
But is it stored?
Yes, it’s sent to posthog.
I never knew it had telemetry, this fork of it I haven’t tried apparently doesn’t though: https://github.com/Its-treason/bruno
Wish I knew how to copy / paste a multi line in windows.
Bruno seems significantly less evil . . . for now
Bruno has telemetry users can’t opt out of: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/337
Which is misguided if not evil. Unnaceptable either way, IMO.
The only thing I still use Postman for at work is when running API performance benchmarks, as I wasn’t yet motivated enough to write a curl wrapper to do such tests and plot the results. Especially when doing things like ramp up etc. it becomes more than a simple for-loop.
Can someone recommend an existing command line tool for that?
If you are running performance benchmarks, how about using jmeter?
Thank you, from a quick glance it seems to be able to do everything I need. I will try it for my next load test.
One more reason, there is a “copy as cURL” option in the Firefox developer tools network tab. It gives you a perfect cURL command including all the necessary cookies and headers to send the exact HTTP request that your browser just sent.
Yay, learning!
OMFG I wished I knew about this years ago! Thank you!
Total feelings of superiority: immeasurable.
Just use netcat
-H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"query": "{ users { name } }"}'? No. Why would you do that when you can just do--json '{"query": "{ users { name } }"}'. Yeah curl is awesome.If you’re trying to say that curl isn’t he best option for my mom, you’re totally right.
For developers, on he other hand…
I believe they are just pointing out a more concise cli option. No value judgment included as far as I can tell.
Yeah tbh I just thought the --json option was pretty neat - I hadn’t known about it until fairly recently
curl is not great when testing configuration for various software solutions. there are a few better options than postman like httpie and another one but I forget its name.
ducaale/xh is another much like curl. Closer to postman are Hoppscotch and Insomnia.
Xh is my favorite— a rewrite of httpie with some fixes.
ok yeah I think the other one I used was like a fork of insomnia.
Did you read the full post?
I did and I did not see anything in the article that would take your api and give you an equivalent statement in a variety of languages which I think is why it was nice using the programs but i has been over a year since I did it. It was a fairly high amount of convenience.
isn’t this how RMS uses the internet? By cURLing all the URLs?
No, he has his own bizarre approach
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.
That’s a general statement about that man’s existence - he has his own bizarre approach.
The entire rant is basically: ‘Why would you use a programming language, just write binary’. I hate these kinds of arguments because they go against the most basic principles of IT.
Do you consider Postman (and such) a programming language?
What’s the most basic principle of IT?
Maybe I didnt word it well. I didnt mean thats the literal message, I was just mocking the way gatekeeping elitist programmers talk. Just because you can do everything in command line, doesnt mean you dont need a UI for anything other than games.
Principles that Im referring to are e.g. abstraction and ‘divide and conquer’. IT exists to make things simple that would otherwise be hard (to put it simply). Why would you deliberately abstain from using an abstraction that makes API testing easier and faster?
Not saying Postman is good btw, but there are alternatives and command line is not one I would recommend to a sane person (maybe to someone that needs a way to feel superior and brag about being a hardcore programmer).
Principles that Im referring to are e.g. abstraction and ‘divide and conquer’. IT exists to make things simple that would otherwise be hard (to put it simply). Why would you deliberately abstain from using an abstraction that makes API testing easier and faster?
We’ve gone well past that now though and are back into making pointless and unnecessary complications to differentiate products so ‘new solutions’ can be sold managerial types.
Adding a service that needs to authenticate adds more steps and more complication. It’s not making the task easier.
I like Hoppscotch
