Postman is the new Dropbox in terms of useless features for the sake of growth or whatever.
Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
81–90 of 209 posts
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#82My 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!
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#83Nice 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..."
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#84I 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.
OP states they built this because they wanted a portable version of Insomnia.
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#85If 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?
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#86Nothing 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
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 or 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)
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#88Postman, Insomnia, Paw seem to fall in similar league. But if you are running VSCode simply use Thunderclient.
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#89I would recommend VS Code with RestClient extension.
Re: Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman
#90I 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.