Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

restfox.dev

758 pointskermire182 comments

Last time I posted this it didn't garner much interest. There have been lots of improvements and fixes since the last release.

Quick list of features:

  - Workspaces
  - Tabs
  - Nested Folders
  - Lots of context menus
  - Response history
  - Plugins
  - Runs fully in the browser and runs offline if necessary
  - Chrome and Firefox extension to bypass CORS restrictions
  - Desktop builds for all platforms
  - GraphQL support
  - Import collections exported from Postman and Insomnia
  - Simple user friendly interface

I built this because I love Insomnia but wanted a portable version that I could run in the browser.

If you're tired of Postman's bloated interface and slow startup times, do give this a try.

Open articleView on HN

Cool project! A true, open source alternative to Postman will be valuable. It seems like you’ve got the major elements in place.

Unsolicited UX notes…

I read Hacker News on mobile, so tried the app on mobile and ran into some challenges. In order to save space, eliminate the right click, and work on mobile please consider changing:

    You can right click here to create a new request or a new folder

To the following (illustrated using pseudo markdown):

    [Create request] or [Create a folder]

It would also be helpful to replace the GitHub star link with a link to your README. GitHub star links are problematic because they require a login that adds friction that prevents people from getting to your README page. People will login if they decide to star the project, but they might never get to your GitHub if they don’t have time to login or can’t easily login on the device where they’re reading.

Thank you. The UI is not currently built with mobile in mind. I have been thinking of implementing a responsive layout but haven't had the time to do it.

I did not know about the GitHub star login thing. Will try to rectify it when I can. Thanks for all your UX notes.

Github Star link looks fixed.

There is also hopscotch - unsure about licensing but it is self hostable

I dug into hoppscotch since my org balked at Postman enterprise costs, but was disappointed. It is open source and can run locally, but it still only talks to their cloud that stores your collections as a logged-in user (or session storage if you're offline). It's definitely a fledgeling commercial project, not a true open-source alternative, though you could fork it easily enough probably.

I had been hoping to keep all of our APIs centralized in git and run the local (or cloud for our ENVs) from that repo, but it doesn't read any query/API/collection defs from file.

(Not to come off as demanding of OSS, it's a wonderful product, but unfortunately you have to dig deep to figure out the limitations.)

EDIT: Also, what I'd go with now is Thunder client for VS code leveraging API defs stored within each repo + the localized vars such as auth info.

I tried Thunder too but their "please log in" popup is quite annoying. Wasn't aware it can leverage repo contents though - that seems like a killer feature.

> fledgeling commercial project, not a true open-source alternative

Yeah most of the self-host stuff tends to be like that unfortunately. Understandable but not ideal.

You should checkout https://www.github.com/usebruno/bruno they have collections that run on top of a folder that can be synced with git

> Last time I posted this it didn't garner much interest.

Looks good. I use Postman daily and it sucks, so always open to alternatives.

I don't recall what it looked like the last time you posted, but I wonder if part of the low interest is because upon arrival it doesn't instantly jump out to the visitor that this is something you can host/run locally. It's very easy to miss the Github links top right. And if you don't realise that, then what you see is a third party website expecting you to send your development requests through their UI, which is off-putting.

As I say, I don't remember, but that may be why I skipped it last time. I'll pay more attention this time!

(Edit: split paragraphs for clarity)

I currently use Postman but havent had problems yet, though next week I'm joining an API crew. Your opinion seems strong; could you tell me where you ran into pitfalls with it I should look out for?

Postman is a classic victim of venture funding. It was a great, simple, useful product, and then they had to become a rapid-growth business.

The app has been buggy since its first major overhaul, and it now also has incredible feature bloat. It's hard to find what you want, and the UI is constantly pushing you to make use of features you don't want to use. It no longer works well as a scratchpad because they want you to organize everything into a full API IDE, which is not something I want or need.

Agree with all.

There are also inconsistencies between Postman running in the browser and the desktop app.

I documented a 3rd party API in Postman desktop and the called me all sorts of names because it didn't work. Postman support told them to download the desktop client and then it worked.

Postman used to be extremely fast, lightweight. Near instant to open and use. Those were the good days.

Now it's hot garbo.

What do you think Insomnia and/or Stoplight?

I switched to "vscode-restclient" about a year ago and never looked back. It has variables, everything is saved as text, and I can commit my request suite to source control for collaboration's sake.

https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

Same here. Usually you just want to make simple queries, and this is a simple text based way to make m.

I have been recently trying https://www.github.com/usebruno/bruno and it allows you to use your own version control

The only reason I use Postman still is the Authentication tab has really nice helpers for getting tokens (OAuth 1/2) and signing requests HMAC. It even works with Azure Active Directory.

There are really goods suggestions in this thread, I just made a compilation of all the links posted (at this time):

Restfox https://restfox.dev/

bruno https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

Hoppscotch https://hoppscotch.io/

Hit https://hit.yolo42.com/

HTTP Client https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...

Hurl https://hurl.dev

Insomnia https://github.com/Kong/insomnia

Kreya https://kreya.app

Milkman https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman

Nap https://github.com/davesheldon/nap

Paw https://paw.cloud

restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

REST Client https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

Socketfox https://socketfox.dev

Step CI https://stepci.com

vim-http-client https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client

vscode-restclient https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

verb https://github.com/federicotdn/verb

Saved for the next time I need to test some REST! Thank you!

So the most popular open-source Postman alternatives seem to be

HoppScotch (47.7k stars, 2019, Vue): https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

Insomnia (24.2k stars, 2017, React): https://github.com/Kong/insomnia

Restfox (405 stars, 2022, Vue): https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox

bruno (30 stars, 2022, Tauri, Electron, Next): https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

---

You can find more here: https://alternativeto.net/software/postman/

Thanks for the shoutout. I am the author of Bruno :)

A unique things that seperates bruno from the rest is that it is a "local first" api client.

The collections get stored as folders and files on your local files system (imagine git repo), thereby allowing the developers to use the version control of their choice.

I am only an occasional users, but for me the Firefox Plugin "RESTClient" gets the job done:

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/restclient

Not sure how this compares to the more sophisticated tools presented here.

Postman is the new Dropbox in terms of useless features for the sake of growth or whatever.

Nice. If you want to implement another feature: see the error response. My server returned 428, but I couldn't see the contents nor header, only a generic "preview".

That's very odd. Will look into this.

And the Cookie header isn't sent? (using it on Firefox 106.1).

I'm using the fetch API for making requests and fetch sadly forbids the Cookie header from getting passed. Will be looking into how I can bypass this.

~~I think axios can. Its API is similar to fetch, except for the return status. You could also manipulate the cookies before and after transmission, but that might be messy when you hit the browser's cookie limits.~~

Scratch that. I wasn't thinking clearly. I ran the call from restfox.dev, and it's another domain, of course. You'd need to write your own http client to get around it.

A nice feature would be import and export from/to Curl commands. When collaborating with clients or even colleagues it's easier to send curl commands.

Definitely something I'll be implementing soon. Importing and exporting curl commands is a good feature to have. Thanks for the feature suggestion.

I wonder if the chromium project has these functions all ready for you to grab from their dev tools?

What's the difference between Restfox and https://github.com/Kong/insomnia ?

Seems both of them are Postman alternative.

An even more mature project is Hoppscotch (47k stars)

https://hoppscotch.io/

Any chance of the ability to do web sockets? Postman has started supporting this recently (in beta) but I really don't want to use Postman.

Any other suggestions for web socket testing clients also welcome.

I definitely intend to add web socket support eventually. Meanwhile, there's https://socketfox.dev which I made for my friends. You can use it to test web sockets.

https://socketfox.dev/ doesn't resolve for me :/

I have used https://github.com/Kong/insomnia for Websocket stuff

hoppscotch can do websockets and socket.io and SSE

I think the whole point of people still use postman today is a easy way the sync between users or manage user that have access to the workspace. There are a lot of alternatives without such features. But with such feature? Not too much.

> - Runs fully in the browser and runs offline if necessary

Couldn't understand why this isn't the default.

curl is always available and slapping a display layer on top of something like curl shouldn't need to talk to some backend server.

>curl is always available

curl is not installed by default in many distros

Also, I don't think it's possible to call external processes from within the browser sandbox

> curl is not installed by default in many distros

Which ones (apart from alpine)? I thought curl was pretty much as basic as it got and is always there.

I just installed Ubuntu using deboostrap and it did not come with curl (to my surprise)

debian

On the top of the concept, not curl itself.

If curl can run locally, so should all of these tools.

The offline part is critical for me. The only other thing I would prefer is an application that doesn't use Electron.

Be careful with Postman. It seems they upload all your secrets to their servers. We stopped to use it a time ago. I don't know if they changed in this regard.

How else would they sync all of the shared stuff in your workspace? I'm more interested if they properly encrypt my data in transit and at rest and whether Postman employees have free access to our secrets.

I got a bulletin from our security team saying Postman stores it all in plain text on their servers. Unbelievable if true. Haven't used it since. They have all your passwords.

I had this gut feeling, but no way to check. The handling of secrets is not explicitly states, i.e probably bad.

I like the looks of httpie’s new desktop client but no idea if their secret handling is any better.

This is from their website: https://www.postman.com/trust/security/

> Depending upon its sensitivity classification, customer data is AES-256-GCM encrypted at the server-side before storage. Postman environment variables are covered in this classification and we strongly encourage you to use them to store your authentication keys and passwords. We have also added sessions in the 6.2 release onwards of Postman. We recommend using session variables for any data that you do not want to be synced to Postman's servers.

> Depending upon its sensitivity classification

What does this mean?

> Postman environment variables are covered in this classification and we strongly encourage you to use them to store your authentication keys and passwords.

It reads to me that they encrypt Postman environment variables and encourage you to use those.

Not sure what else is "Customer data" in that regard but it seems they consider at least that bit worthy of encryption.

Here’s how we do it: https://httpie.io/blog/changelog-0017#data-security

Does anyone have a source for this? I need to present this to our team if it's true.

They sync everything. If you store stuff in collections, requests, or environments, it’s uploaded.

Presuming it’s end-to-end, but don’t know about at rest encryption

If I just need to make a simple POST or PUT I'll use Firefox's dev tools network tab. Right click a request and click 'Edit and resend'. If I need more than that I'll use vscode restclient.

Nice work! I wasn't familiar with insomnia so when I read your first line there I read it as "I love not being able to sleep because it gave me time to code this project..."

Haha thanks. Didn't think it could be interpreted like that :D

If you live in Emacs, there is the amazing verb package that does the same, it supports org-mode primarily and also integrates with org-babel nicely.

https://github.com/federicotdn/verb

Although I mainly stick with curl or requests due to muscle memory, there's also restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el. I imagine having builtin org support is super convenient, thanks for sharing.

For Visual Studio Code there is a similar plugin called REST Client https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...

I have moved from postman to https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client and have never looked back ever since, its opens in vim and has variables to store values and can store comments too in a .txt file along with the http calls. Give this a try if you are using vim.

Nice to the tools come out to save us from postman bloat

I have been recently trying out bruno - https://www.github.com/usebruno/bruno

It allows me to save my collection on my filesystem (as folders and files) and I use git to save them in my private repo

Nice, I wonder how it compares to hoppscotch.io

Previous reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32671805

Wha's always boggled me about Postman is that it doesn't have autosave. It's 2022, what doesn't have autosaving? So thank you for adding auto-saving, huge improvement on Postman!

This certainly looks promising, though the only thing I can see its missing that Postman does is allowing the use of domain specific certificate authentication and the use of a user provided certificate chain.

If you want something like Restfox but as a CLI, that tests your APIs automatically, give Step CI a try

https://stepci.com

It’s free and open-source on GitHub!

Disclaimer: I’m the author

I like it but please dont make me right click to do something! please add a little plus or something like it.

Otherwise great work! needs a little disclaimer though that you will not save any of my requests =)

Thank you. Will look into preventing the right click requirement and provide an alternative for that.

It should be saving your requests automatically. Maybe your browser is blocking IndexedDB somehow? That's what's used by the application to store the data locally. Also do make sure you're not in incognito mode, as changes will be lost once you're out of it.

Firefox private mode completely blocks indexeddb.

My biggest gripe with Postman is the horrible theming. Except for light and dark, 0 control over the appearance of this app that I have to look at for hours almost every day.

You don't have to put up with postman. There are better alternatives.

> You don't have to put up with postman

Unless you work on a team that's standardized around it as a collaboration tool.

My biggest gripe is that its design leads to accumulating long list of slightly different "tests" whose purpose is soon forgotten. I suppose there are better practices that can stop that, but the path of least resistance is "copy, edit, run," and so a huge pile of meaningless garbage accumulates.

Something is missing.

InvalidStateError: A mutation operation was attempted on a database that did not allow mutations.

[Edit]: I'm on Firefox (with ublock origin). I see others having issues too.

Firefox with ublock origin should not cause any issues. The issue might be caused by Firefox's private window implementation which does not allow IndexedDB operations, which is what Restfox uses for storing the data of the application locally.

Tried to just GET www.google.com; says error and suggests bypassing with some plugins. Don't think I want to continue further.

try to `fetch('https://www.google.com')` from console on a few different websites and you'll see either CSP errors or the same CORS errors that come up in restfox. all the extension does is send the request with the runtime api to get around the (good and reasonable) security constraints on web pages loaded over http: https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox/tree/main/packages/b...

I don’t understand, what is it, what does it do?

Ok, it’s a tool to test rest api.

Good for you. Now did you check what postman does?

In the past I was using SoapUI. I liked it. Just because you guys were mentioning Postman alternatives :).

Importing of postman is very important feature, I will take a look definitely.

Entering "news.ycombinator.com" and pressing send gives me an error.

In the error message the solution is present, install the addon:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/restfox-cors-helpe...

There's also a FF one.

I'd expect someone from HN to give more descriptive reports than "gives me an error".

You are right and I admit my uh ... error.

Noticed a small bug, I can't paste into the URL bar.

Paw for mac users, native client.

Is there a way to get it to ignore the cache?

- Nested Folders

what's wrong with hoppscotch?

Page is not working for me. I'm in Firefox

Windows 10, Firefox 106.0.1, uBlock, multi-account containers, facebook container, bitwarden, DDG privacy, consent-o-matic, font contrast, dark reader

Works fine for me.

Opened a request to https://api.publicapis.org/entries and it fetched results.

Postman, Insomnia, Paw seem to fall in similar league. But if you are running VSCode simply use Thunderclient.

Cool!

Hoppscotch [1][2] (previously Postwoman) is also a very nice free and open-source Postman alternative.

[1]: https://hoppscotch.io/

[2]: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

I also thought about this when reading the title. Would be great to see a comparison between the new tool and postwoman

If you are a minimalist, and are using VS Code, try https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... which is a pure text syntax to describe API requests, and execute them right from the editor window. I now have api.http text file in every API-first project I am building and I love it.

Do you have a single api.http file or do you you multiple {route}.http files?

Not OP but you can store all your routes in one file or multiple, it's up to you.

Personally what I do is I script out full API workflows in different files. So one file might login, then POST to add an object, then GET that object off an endpoint, then patch that endpoint, then trigger the GET object again.

Another workflow might login, upload an image, get that image, etc. For me the scripting is what makes this appealing.

But you could setup one file that documents and tests all your endpoints similar to Postman.

I like this one because it's easy to keep API workflows with my projects. The scripting ability here is phenomenal. However only really useful if you code in VS Code.

Jetbrains also provides a similar, albeit slightly incompatible syntax for the same thing.

In the end, I think hurl [0] is nicer, because it’s open source and it’s a cli tool (and VS code also has a syntax highlighting plugin for it), making it editor independent.

[0]: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl

For anyone looking for an aesthetic Postman alternative, I can't recommend https://insomnia.rest/ enough

Insomnia is open source too

I have been trying out https://hurl.dev and so far been really liking it. Plain text format, everything runs very quickly locally, it can capture data from previous requests to run workflows and serve as a testing tool.

If you like hurl, you may also like Step CI, which uses yaml, generates tests from your OpenAPI spec and is easy to integrate with CI/CD

Give it a try: https://stepci.com

It's free and open-source on GitHub, built by the community!

Disclaimer: I'm the original author

Having a startup delay because the cli is written in node is a non starter for me. Hurl is written in Rust and starts up incredibly fast. It looks nice though for those that want to stick with the JS ecosystem though.

I totally understand. I'm a big fan of Rust myself, but we decided to go with TypeScript so we could quicker iterate on ideas and introduce new features. Another reason is that our goal is to be a community-driven project and I think we both can agree that there are far more web developers using JS than any other programming language

Our workflow specs are open-source as well, so if anybody wants to contribute a compatible runner written in other language - you're welcome!

https://github.com/stepci/stepci/blob/main/docs/workflow-syn...

Thanks for mentioning hurl. I just started looking into it and Insomnia (with the cli) as potential replacements for ci testing tools.

hurl looks pretty simple to use, and way easier to get started with than what we're using at work currently.

I use https://kreya.app/. It is very lean and the only GUI client not using Electron, I could find.

There's also https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman.

Here's an alternative I recently came across. In Firefox on the network tab of the dev console, right click on an XHR request. You'll have two relevant options: "Resend" and "Edit and Resend". Edit and Resend doesn't give you all the features of Postman, but it is useful and a lot easier. I have spent a lot of time in Postman just putting in all the headers and POST body to set up the API call. With this method in Firefox, all parameters are already set because it's an exact copy of the request you already sent. You can change params or just hit send when you're ready to retest something you're doing on the backend.

I am very happy to save you a lot of time for copy&pasting requests to Postman. Since Postman can import curl commands, just right-click on a command in Firefox, Copy as -> Curl, click on the Import in Postman, import as text, paste curl, mission accomplished. Hope it helps.

They actually removed the plain Resend option and renamed Edit and Resend to just Resend.

I'm just now migrating my postman collections to .rest text files and the REST-client plugin for vscode (that name is both good and bad at the same time btw, it like marketing a new car and naming it "Car").

Grantet it does not do everything Postman does but I'm pretty happy so far. Environment variables and secrets stays in a workspace settings.json and the .rest files can be version controlled and shared.

Always bet on text!

This. My current hobby project[0] is basically something I started because I was frustrated with the inability to version control my tests in Postman alongside my API code. If it can't be committed to source control, then it's not really your code.

Now I can run all my tests FAST locally and set up a CI/CD pipeline in about 15 mins that will pick up and run them as well. At this point I'm not even sure a UI is necessary (maybe for the QA folks--maybe just an import from a postman collection will be enough for them, though).

[0]: https://github.com/davesheldon/nap

Sorry for a complete tangent - I've been assuming gray OP's text in ask/show meant people were downvoting a post and it always weirded me out - now had to double check to confirm it's simply always grayed out (why though?)

If you're using VS Code and only need to test REST APIs, then try "Rest Client" extension by Huachao Mao. It does everything I used Postman for, using a text file. A quality of life changer.

There was previously Postwoman which I believe is now hoppscotch https://github.com/f0rb1d/postwoman

https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

I switched to insomnia when postman changed their pricing pulling the rug out from everyone wanting us to pay like $300 more per month. (Before they back tracked)

https://insomnia.rest/

I actually prefer it.

One thing I love from Insomnia.rest is the ability to import CURL commands, including an entire list of newline-delimited CURL commands from the clipboard. This makes it easier to modify XHR's you pulled from your browser via a right click -> "copy all as cURL (bash)".

Yup. Use this all the time, either when I want to automate something on an undocumented API, or if I want to do some basic security testing on API's at work.

Postman can do this as well. I've been using this a bunch recently due to some project limitations and it has made life so much easier.

ETA: I just tried the functionality on Insomnia and I have to admit the UX is nicer. Just paste into the URL bar. Whereas with Postman it's CMD+O, Click on "Raw Text", click in textarea, paste, press import. Insomnia looks to have added OpenAPI support too (it was missing it last time I played with it) so maybe it's time to re-evaluate Insomnia

Postman's UI is cluttered

I don't disagree. I've just been using it for so long (8 or 9 years now I think) and it's so ingrained in my workflows that I haven't bothered to re-evaluate it in ages. This is probably the kick in the butt I needed.

The world is your oyster, my friend. Restfox is pretty similar to Insomnia, which is what I use, so I'll probably give Restfox a shot and see about hosting my own instance on the LAN.

Same, my team and I started using Insomnia too when Postman pulled that stunt; doesn't matter if they went back on, good will lost in that way is a bridge burned that can't be rebuilt.

Same here, moved from postman to insomnia, now mostly using the rest plugin for visual studio code. Prefer using regular text files.

I similarly use restclient.el on Emacs and love it.

For those unfamiliar with these plugins, they allow you to simply write text files looking like:

    GET https://example.com/posts/5
    Accept: application/json

    POST https://example.com/posts
    Content-Type: application/json
    Authorization: Bearer abc

    {"title": "foo", "body": "bar"}

and simply execute the requests from the buffer.

There's one built into the JetBrains editors, too. And the upcoming release is going to allow one to wrap very long URLs for better visibility and include fun things like "$random.email" in the request: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/10/intellij-idea-2022-3... (EAP releases are always free of charge, if one wanted to play with it right now; just please report bugs if you find them, as that's the reason they're free)

I have been using Thunder client in vs code. Love not having another app. Postman is horrible now.

Moved from Postman to Insomnia too. Postman was taking too much time to start and was very unresponsive compared to Insomnia, on my Work Laptop.

Same here, switched from postman to insomnia when it became impossible to ignore how slow, cluttered and generally bloated it became. Haven’t missed it since. Insomnia is pretty great. I’m sure there’s lots of stuff that postman can do that insomnia can’t, but insomnia is still very capable, while being snappy and not being in the way. Highly recommend it.

OP states they built this because they wanted a portable version of Insomnia.

Switched away from Postman to a native Mac app and my RAM couldn't be happier (https://paw.cloud)

Seems pretty nice but $50 is a little high - is it really worth the premium?

$50 doesn't look high to me, assuming it does everything it says it does really well. Just designing an API in a nice UI is worth more than that!

(No affiliation.)

It isn’t been, in my experience. If my team used it collaboratively it might be.

It’s a solid app and worth it if you’ll use it a lot. I simply didn’t because piling things in there isn’t particularly valuable if it isn’t readily available to the people I work with.

No -- I used and paid for PAW for a while. I gave up on all MacPaw products once I realized their sales staff contacted me after I asked them not to -- they immediately lost me as customer. They just wanted to 'help' me get on to a more expensive plan that was for Teams.

There are plenty of great alternatives: HTTPie is one I like. Haven't found a good alternative to CleanMyMac yet though.

Unless I'm mistaken, Paw isn't owned by MacPaw? It's an unrealted product with a one time purchase price.

There is some financial relationship there. You get PAW with a SetApp bundle that MacPaw sell as a subscription.

You currently get 239 apps with the setapp bundle, I don't think there's anything special about that relationship.

There's zero 'relationship'. SetApp bundles popular Mac software, of which Paw is one.

>There's zero 'relationship'.

It's a reseller. They probably even charge a commission so there is a business/financial relationship.

I got $50 of value out of my purchase, but that was quite a few years ago. Dunno if I’d buy it today when there are other alternatives

Postman is $15, it just takes a bit more than 3 months to surpass the price :P

I’ve been using it for a long time and I’d happily pay $100 for it.

It can consume swagger/openapi docs and generate calls. It can generate code snippets and cURL requests. You can extract values from one response body to use as a variable in another request, the built in features go on and on- and there’s a decent extension ecosystem/write your own.

Most importantly, it just works, and it works well and quickly, with pretty much any auth scheme I’ve ever had to deal with.

I’ve only got really a couple of nits with the stand-alone version.

I still can’t figure out how to make it “use the same auth scheme” for every single request globally. Each request requires the auth config, but this is solved by just copying an existing request and starting from that. This could very well be my lack of knowledge, though I feel like I know the tool well.

The .paw file is binary and doesn’t do well checked into source control if you’ve got more than one person using it.

The Teams version, which requires a monthly sub kinda/sorta mimics a git style branch strategy for merging different members changes and handles the team problem pretty well.

All in all though, it is absolutely and BY FAR the best request tool I’ve ever used. A great combination of simple just get out of the way and advanced automation strategies. I use it every day.

EDIT TO ADD:

I forgot to mention their license is still a lifetime license. I paid them $50, probably 6 years ago now, and have never been forced to pay them another dime. I’d pay per major version or do the IntelliJ perpetual fallback if it came to it, but I’ve never once been bait and switched (looking at you Tower2).

insomnia has all this and is free for individual use. for DRY authentication you can use https://www.npmjs.com/package/insomnia-plugin-default-header..., if thats not enough you can pair it with https://www.npmjs.com/package/insomnia-plugin-accesstoken

It's quite nice. I think it's worth it but you could always do the same for free/cheaper with other tools out there and/or curl.

Depends on how much you value a tool like this. And it's a one-time purchase for life, not a subscription.

I bought it during a BF deal. Perhaps wait a month?

the difference in price reflects the extra time (and background experience) it takes to build a given thing as a native app instead of an electron app. not saying paw is especially good though

Now that they're maintaining versions based on web technologies and are now just a cog in the VC Funded RapidAPI machine, are you concerned that makes the writing on the wall for the native Mac app?

My favorite testing HTTP Client is still just the IntelliJ built-in, pure text. You know exactly what you send without having to navigate menus and whatnot. In the end, 99% of HTTP requests are just that, text.

Can you chain requests together? Like if a request requires auth it will invoke login then take the token for use in the next request.

I haven't used it myself, but there is an option to parse responses with JavaScript and set variables.

  GET https://httpbin.org/get
  
  > {%
      client.global.set("my_cookie", response.headers.valuesOf("Set-Cookie")[0]);
  %}

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/exploring-http-syntax.ht...

Interesting. I have 2 endpoints (login and get settings) I use for testing in a desktop app and sometimes firing up insomnia for that project is a hassle. But rider has that rest client too so maybe I’ll try it for this one thing.

Well... that's called programming, no? :)

This is what I wish all http clients could adopt.

Use plain text files (IntelliJ already introduced .http files, which work great) Sadly it will never work because that would break 90% of the incentives to pay, which his having a sync system. Because then I could simply commit my http requests and git would be my sync server.

Personally I don't like the IntelliJ Client, the UI is kind of ugly and requires a lot of actions each time I want to send and review a response. Insomnia is way better in that regard.

Good context might me my issue comment on Hoppscotch: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/issues/870#issuecom...

This is what I have been working on: https://hit.yolo42.com/.

Early days but would love some feedback if you get a chance to try it out.

The idea is good, but I want a GUI.

And it fits nicely into git!

I have been working on a CLI first workflow that doesn’t require IntelliJ: https://hit.yolo42.com/. I spend my days in the terminal and like curl and httpie for most parts. Hit is to fill in the gaps rather than redo the whole experience of sending HTTP requests.

I’ve a very early prototype. If you get a chance to try it out, please do and share your feedback.

I can't resist to propose my own solution: a cli tool, plain text based, curl, and Rust https://hurl.dev

The market is overcrowded by good solutions, best wishes to other tools!

This looks quite good!

Thank you for Hurl—I started using it a few months ago and it’s been a delight!

I would recommend VS Code with RestClient extension.

Yeah I realized that's all I need after a while.

Nice to have a file with some calls to make right in the client. Can take those to an outside app if needed.

Same here, I switched from postman and that combination is really all I need.

my needs are very basic, but I've been using vs code extension called ThunderClient

Nothing to take away from all of this, but please learn cURL. Postman and all its alternatives are great and all, but they also hide a lot of things that will hinder your debugging skills. As an alternative try httpie. Not because CLIs are cool but because you can see the headers and the raw response more easily. Developers need to understand what content type is, what response headers are, how to limit them, how to tweak them. And the snippets that Postman provides are not always the right way to send requests in a given language

I like xh as a faster httpie as well

I'd take Burp Suite over cURL.

The command line fucking SUCKS for sending anything beyond basic HTTP requests.

Why should I use this over https://hoppscotch.io ?

how secure is hoppscotch.io?

well it runs in your browser but I don't know how it syncs between browsers.

My version of Postman is to open a Jupyter notebook and

>> import requests

it is completly garbage on mobile

Hi I am one of the contributors to Insomnia. You guys are all invited to join our Slack channel and give us suggestions and feedback! https://chat.insomnia.rest/

Add env color on SEND button.

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