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Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

restfox.dev

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Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

#101

Post by topspin »

user3939382 wrote: post #36

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

#103

Post by projproj »

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.

Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

#106

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

aliqot wrote: post #71
apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

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.

Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

#107

Post by cercatrova »

stonecharioteer wrote: post #86

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…

I like xh as a faster httpie as well

Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

#109

Post by kermire »

sphars wrote: post #105

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.

Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

#110

Post by nkantar »

jicea wrote: post #82
duiker101 wrote: post #19

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.

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!

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