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Comment by stock_toaster | Hacker News Reader

I prefer cli tools for api driving/testing, and httpie[1] works pretty well for that.

I like httpie but the app can do a lot more than sending requests now (which you might not be able to do in a CLI tool). You can write tests and run a bunch of requests together to simulate different scenarios: http://www.getpostman.com/docs/jetpacks_writing_tests.

Here's a library in Haskell if you are inclined to do this with an embedded domain-specific language instead:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/http-test

Then throw HTTPie into a bash script.

There are lots of things that you can do easily with postman but would be difficult with a CLI tool.

I doubt that completely, citation needed.

I agree that CLI are awesome and you can do way more using it that with any other UI (specially a web one), but taking HTTP API testing as an example, postman lets you do a bunch of stuff that are so simple with one click that I can see some people not wanting to dive in the CLI world, write a bunch of stuff and also having to store environment data for requests with extra files (I think thats where the 'difficult' from the previous comment comes along, but that's just me guessing...)

Taking that into consideration, Postman's web interface lets you

- See all the request history that you can easily reply any of them with one click

- Save requests and share them (including a collection of requests)

- Have and share environment variables to change, for example, between production and development API urls, password, params, etc (I know, a CLI also lets you do that, but it soooo simple to just select and preview the environment variables from the list)

- easily handle oAuth and other authentication forms out of the box

But you will suffer (a lot) trying to use Postman to - Handle binary input/outputs

- Stream responses

- Handle cookies

So, depending on what your day to day problems are you should use a different tool... Oh, and I didn't know about HTTPie, thanks for sharing :)

None of those things are intractable, I have had scripts handle them all. On top of that, writing scripts educates you on how such systems work. It really isn't challenging.

Sure. I can script a lot of things and have learned a ton by doing that. But when I'm focused on making an API or debugging one, I don't want to spend the time writing a script if there is a readily available tool that does what I need. I can better spend the time improving the app.

Care to share them? It sounds like a lot of people would like to use them instead of Postman.

I find your response to be really arrogant. Postman is an easily installed Chrome extension that can be supplied to everyone on your team, regardless of skill level. Requiring a cli isn't as easy as a one click install - there's dependencies (Python etc.) that are required which, while easy for many, aren't as simple for a lot of web developers - especially those who focus on front end development and may just need an easy tool for inspecting API requests they need to make.

There's still a wide market for GUI based programs, and Postman is an excellent extension that I've used for years (even though I'm a CLI guy myself). It's always there, easy to use, and powerful to boot.

Edit 1: Grammar / Spelling

Totally agreed. Another benefit (or set of benefits): when you've got 5 CLI tabs open already, and you're trying to remember where your curl response went, it's nice to know Postman has (a) history of recent requests in a readily clickable list, (b) a different window that's easily accessible, and (c) any saved headers and tokens that I can otherwise never remember.

Like Tesla said "if you thought a bit more, you wouldn't have to sweat so much"

All of those would be eliminated with preparation and planning. And the results would be better quality than ad hoc poking with Bash

Yeah, if we all prepared and planned perfectly for absolutely everything we do in life then we probably would need less assistance.

Meanwhile, in the real world, sometimes things have to be done fast and messily.

Testing http:// services is not one of those things

you didn't answer the question.

> There are lots of things that you can do easily with postman but would be difficult with a CLI tool.

the jury is still out on this one. i'm not buying it now either. you've convinced me Postman is easier for non-technical people, but i'm not convinced it's more useful or easier than a command line.

I can't use postman easily. I don't have a Google account. What do I do?

You don't need one? Install the add on directly.

Everyone can use it easily. It's an easy tool to use. You don't need a Google account to install an extension.

> What do I do?

Install the extension and use postman easily.

Uhh how about a little more detail? I installed it, but I have no idea how to open it in a tab. Unlike my other extensions, I don't see any icon buttons next to my URL bar.

EDIT: If like me, you're using a Mac, you can use Alfred to open Postman. I still have no idea where to find the extension (I have both the extension and the "packaged app", whatever the difference is, installed on my machine)

Hmmm, I don't know. When I install it on Windows Chrome, I immediately get an icon next to the URL bar. Sorry I can't be of more help.

I know that there is nothing that an add-in can do that a scripting environment can't and it is not a that difficult, which is the assertion I am responding to. Sooner or later the dialog box driven tool will prevent you from doing what you want.

I would still like an example of a series of Http:// requests that is "difficult" to do with just curl, wget and a bit of shell script.

Curl is my go to tool for this sort of interaction. I have been a long time Postman user though. The number one feature it has which curl doesn't is collections. Which is basically their name for saving queries. I have my companies entire API saved in various collections which allows me to quickly do any API call without looking at documentation or having to whip up so JSON boilerplate.

For more advanced or one off testing, curl would still be my go to.

I have a "collection" of curl command lines aliased in my ~/.bash_aliases file. Maybe something like that would help you?

Chrome dev tools make testing RESTful backends with curl very easy: right-click on a request in network panel and choose "Copy as curl". Priceless little gem.

Can you explain this?

I would really be happy if there is any tool which give option "Copy as curl" !

https://i.imgur.com/sBGycyF.png

(would give - curl 'https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css?Iufnib6nCakqGh6wo0m6' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36' --compressed )

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