Getting Started with Postman: Essential Tools for API Testing
What is Postman?
Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
Key Features of Postman
1. API Repository
Postman serves as a central hub for storing and cataloging all your API-related artifacts. This includes API specifications, documentation, workflow recipes, test cases and results, metrics, and more. By consolidating these elements in one platform, Postman enhances organization and collaboration, allowing teams to work more efficiently.
2. Tools
The Postman platform is equipped with a wide range of tools that accelerate the API lifecycle. From design and testing to documentation and mocking, Postman covers all critical aspects of API development. These tools also facilitate the sharing and discoverability of APIs, making it easier for teams to collaborate and innovate.
3. Governance
Postman's full-lifecycle approach to governance promotes better-quality APIs by encouraging the adoption of best practices early in the development process. This "shift left" strategy fosters collaboration between developer teams and API design teams, ensuring that APIs are well-designed, thoroughly tested, and aligned with organizational standards.
4. Workspaces
To further enhance collaboration, Postman offers various types of workspaces tailored to different needs. These include personal, team, partner, and public workspaces, each designed to help you organize your API work and collaborate effectively, whether within your organization or with external partners.
5. Integrations
Postman integrates seamlessly with essential tools in your software development pipeline, supporting API-first practices. The platform's extensibility through the Postman API and open-source technologies allows for customization and integration with a wide range of tools and workflows, making it a versatile addition to any development environment.
1. API repository
Easily store, catalog, and collaborate around all your API artifacts on one central platform. Postman can store and manage API specifications, documentation, workflow recipes, test cases and results, metrics, and everything else related to APIs.
A single source of truth for APIs
Postman provides a cloud-based, version-controlled, centralized repository for all API artifacts throughout the entire API lifecycle. All of the Postman platform's tools use the repository, which ensures a single source of truth for your APIs. The API repository enables teams and organizations to gather metrics and discern insights through the built-in governance capabilities on the platform. Postman's desktop and web applications connect to the API repository through workspaces for personal, team, partner, or public use. You can also connect your API repository to the other products and tools you use through Postman's pre-built integrations. With the Postman API repository, you can better simplify, organize, and scale your entire API lifecycle, whether it's for a single API or for your entire API landscape.
API Builder
Postman's API Builder helps you easily implement an API design workflow through specifications like OpenAPI, GraphQL, or RAML. The API Builder enables you to manage your API lifecycle from design to deployment and integrate with a variety of source control, CI/CD, gateways, and APM solutions—all in one place.
Native Git support
With Postman's native Git support, the API Builder connects to the source code repository to automatically maintain API documentation, tests, and specifications alongside code. Developers can access API assets in a local development folder for use across local tools—like IDEs, Postman CLI, proxies, and linting tools—during design, development, and testing.
Private API Network
Give your team optimal visibility into your APIs through the Private API Network, a central catalog that's visible only to your team or organization. The Private API Network supports versioning, which helps you maintain control and manage multiple versions of your APIs in the network. In addition, your APIs can be organized into hierarchical folders to mirror your organizational needs.
Public API Network
Postman's Public API Network is the world's largest public API hub. With the Public API Network, you can easily share your organization's public APIs through public workspaces as well as discover thousands of public APIs from companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google.
Search
Find anything in your API universe through the Postman platform's powerful search capabilities. Postman can help you search through your entire API repository to instantly find APIs, collections, or workspaces, Flows, teams, or requests.
2. Tools
The Postman platform includes a comprehensive set of tools that help accelerate the API lifecycle—from design, testing, documentation, and mocking to the sharing and discoverability of your APIs.
API client
The Postman API client is the foundational tool of Postman, and it enables you to easily explore, debug, and test your APIs while also enabling you to define complex API requests for HTTP, REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and WebSockets. The API client automatically detects the language of the response, links, and format text inside the body to make inspection easy.
The client also includes built-in support for authentication protocols like OAuth 1.2/2.0, AWS Signature, Hawk, and many more. Through the API client, you can organize requests into Postman Collections to help you organize your requests for reuse so you don't waste time building everything from scratch. Your collections can also contain JavaScript code to tie requests together or automate common workflows, and you can use scripting to visualize your API responses as charts and graphs.
API design
You can design your API specifications in Postman using OpenAPI, RAML, GraphQL, or SOAP formats. Postman's schema editor makes it easy to work with specification files of any size, and it validates specifications with a built-in linting engine. You can also generate Postman Collections for multiple stages of your API lifecycle—for mocks, documentation, tests, monitors, and more—all from the specification file, all in sync.
API documentation
Make documentation a core part of your API workflow with Postman's automatic documentation features. Postman supports markdown-enabled and machine-readable documentation through the Postman Collection format, and you can generate docs through your OpenAPI files as well. Your docs will automatically include detail on your requests, with sample code in various client languages. You can share the docs with your team or with the world through workspaces or publish them in a dedicated portal.
API testing
Build and run tests directly in Postman or as part of your CI/CD pipeline through Newman (a Collection Runner that enables you to run and test a Postman Collection directly from the command line). Postman can be used to write functional tests, integration tests, regression tests, and more. Postman's Node.js-based runtime contains support for common patterns and libraries that you can use to build tests quickly.
Mock servers
Mock servers enable you to see exactly how your API will run—even before it's in production. Create mock servers in Postman to simulate API endpoints when you don't want to (or can't) send API requests to a real API. You can also simulate network latency in your mock server by specifying custom delays for responses. Mock servers are hosted on Postman's cloud, which means they're available wherever you need them—whether in your local, testing, or staging environments.
Monitors
Postman monitors help you stay up to date on the health and performance of your APIs. Monitors can be run across multiple geographic regions and integrated with third-party alerting systems and dashboards like Datadog, New Relic, Slack, and more. Postman monitors are hosted on Postman's cloud, which means you can set them up quickly.
API detection
Capture requests and cookies from your browser into Postman to speed up your debugging workflow through the Postman Interceptor or the Postman proxy. Interceptor can catch requests and responses. Postman's proxy runs inside the Postman application and can be used with HTTP or HTTPS websites.
3. Governance
Postman's full-lifecycle approach to governance lets adopters shift left their development practices, resulting in better-quality APIs, and fostering collaboration between developer teams and API design teams.
API Governance
Postman's API Governance feature educates developer teams and communicates API design rules within tools where developers live. API design teams can combine both industry best practices with organizational-specific linting rules, all accessible to developers. This full-lifecycle approach to governance lets adopters shift left their development practices, resulting in better-quality APIs, and fostering collaboration between developer teams and API design teams.
API Security
Postman's API Security makes it easy for developers to discover organizational policies and incorporate them into API development. Product managers and developers see security contracts on the same platform where they are designing, building, and deploying APIs. By shifting left, organizations can invest in security earlier on in the lifecycle, while equipping API teams with guidelines and policies to deliver more secure APIs.
Reporting
Get deep insights about your APIs and understand where you are across your entire API landscape with respect to your API lifecycle through Postman's reporting dashboard. The dashboard helps you quickly identify which APIs are undocumented, untested, or unmaintained, which improves your operational management and helps you understand how to use your team resources most effectively. Postman also ensures that your instance is used securely through security audits for access tokens. Your dashboard also includes Security Audit reports that consolidate the findings of the Postman Token Scanner to give you a quick view into whether your organization has accidentally exposed any tokens.
4. Workspaces
Organize your API work and collaborate effectively across your team and organization. With Postman workspaces, you can share your work with internal and external teams, create a single source of truth, and streamline API development.
Collaborate in real-time
- Keep teams aligned by grouping projects together.
- Track changes so anyone invited to your team workspace can collaborate securely and effectively.
- Automatically notify members about changes to APIs as updates sync in real-time.
Speed up your work with templates
- Select from workspace templates that are tailored to solve developers' most common problems.
- Reuse and modify each template, which includes pre-populated sample collections as needed.
Streamline API development
- Create shared, secured, controlled spaces for teams.
- Enhance developer productivity by bringing API producers and consumers closer together.
- Improve reusability of APIs by organizing API contracts, documentation, and testing and then indexing via search.
Manage user access
- Easily control access by assigning roles to members at either the workspace or element level.
- Create a single source of truth: everyone in the workspace sees the same collections, environments, and other tools.
- Watch, fork, and comment on elements.
5. Postman integrations
Postman integrates with the most important tools in your software development pipeline to enable API-first practices. The Postman platform is also extensible through the Postman API and through open source technologies.
Postman is built on open source
Postman is built on open source technologies, which means you can extend Postman or your API workflow in any way you want. From the very beginning of the company, we open sourced the Postman Runtime, the Postman Collection format, and our SDKs to allow developers and organizations the flexibility to work with APIs in any environment or workflow. And there's more: Postman's command-line Collection Runner, Newman, is open source; we're key contributors to OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, JSON Schema, and associated tooling; and we also support industry standards like FHIR, PSD2, OpenTravel, and Open Insurance.
Postman is more than just an API testing tool; it's a comprehensive platform that supports the entire API lifecycle. By offering robust tools, promoting governance, and enabling seamless collaboration, Postman empowers developers to build, test, and manage APIs more effectively. Whether you're working on a small project or a large-scale enterprise application, Postman provides the features and flexibility you need to succeed. For more information about how Postman can transform your API development process, visit their website
