A brief Introduction of Postman tool

What is the Postman tool?

An API platform for creating and utilizing APIs is called Postman. Postman enhances cooperation and streamlines each phase of the API lifecycle to assist you in designing better APIs more quickly.

API repository

On a single platform, you can conveniently save, organize, and collaborate on all of your API artifacts. Everything connected to APIs, including API specifications, documentation, workflow recipes, test cases and results, metrics, and more, may be stored and managed by Postman.

Tools

From design, testing, documentation, and mocking to sharing and discoverability of your APIs, the Postman platform comes with a full suite of tools that assist speed up the API lifecycle.

API client

The core feature of Postman is the API client, which lets you define complicated API requests for HTTP, REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and WebSockets as well as easily browses, debug, test, and explore your APIs.

The language of the response, links, and formatted content inside the body are all automatically detected by the API client to make inspection simple. OAuth 1.2/2.0, AWS Signature, Hawk, and many other authentication protocols are supported natively by the client as well.

You may group requests for reuse into Postman Collections using the API client, saving you time by not having to create everything from scratch. You can utilize scripting and your collections to include JavaScript code that connects requests or automates common workflows.

API design

You can use OpenAPI, RAML, GraphQL, or SOAP formats to create your API specifications in Postman. The schema editor in Postman makes it simple to work with specification files of any size and includes a built-in linting engine to validate specs. Additionally, you may construct Postman Collections from the specification file for various phases of your API lifecycle, including mocks, documentation, tests, monitoring, and more.

API Documentation

With Postman's automatic documentation features, you can integrate documentation into your API process. Through the Postman Collection format, Postman provides markdown-enabled and machine-readable documentation. You may also use your OpenAPI files to generate documentation. Your documentation will immediately contain information about your requests and sample code in different client languages. Through workspaces, you may share the documents with your group or the entire globe, or you can publish them on a special site.

API testing

Create and execute tests directly in Postman or using Newman as part of your CI/CD pipeline (a Collection Runner that enables you to run and test a Postman Collection directly from the command line). Functional tests, integration tests, regression tests, and other types of tests can all be written using Postman. You may quickly create tests using Postman's Node. js-based runtime, which supports support for popular patterns and frameworks.

Mock servers

Even before your API is put into use, you may see exactly how it will function using mock servers. When you can't or don't want to send API queries to a real API, use mock servers in Postman to act as API endpoints. By adding arbitrary delays to your fake server's answers, you may also simulate network slowness.

Since mock servers are housed in Postman's cloud, they are accessible anywhere you need them, even in your local, testing, or staging environments.