Postman Now Supports gRPC • Hacker News Board

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#191

Post by Raidion » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 11:39 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #66

anyfactor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I am not sure where would I even use postman for. I essentially would wait 3-5 minutes to have postman initialized, be greeted with a dialogue box for an update or something, drop a json file for the headers and skim through the output. But it takes seconds to get up and running with requests-html. And it can do anything Postman can do and more. I have no idea how people in organizations use postman though…

> I am not sure where would I even use postman for. It's really handy for generating test suites to hand to people who don't necessarily have the skills to write Python / node / whatever code. Have worked at places where certain changes needed a Postman collection alongside for people to manually verify that it works. (Also handy for un-coder people to make test suites, obvs.) (Also handy as a quick-and-dirty "view t…

I've worked in a place where test suites started in postman because of the lack of skill in QA.

For us, the fact that you end up writing "code" in postman meant it had a learning curve anyway, so it was a really short sighted win.

For everyone smart enough to write postman code, especially postman code that leverages the scripts and storing variables, a simple test project set up by a dev is going to be very worthwhile. Postman doesn't have a linter or compiler, and it doesn't enable easy viewing of changes in source control because it's just one big json file.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#192

Post by a85 » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 1:08 AM UTC

lysium wrote: post #181

ynouri wrote: post #171

My company’s product is an API and Postman has been a key tool to test it, collaborate internally on requests and share it to the external world. Our ecosystem is also very API intensive and we also use Postman to discover other companies APIs. We use all those features: - HTTP requests - Mock servers (to test async requests which call back a webhook endpoint) - Workspaces: private and public - Monitors, alerts and i…

How do you do version control with your postman scripts? That was the biggest issue on my last project. Plus, if the API moves, we had to (manually) find and fix dozens of Postman tests. I'd appreciate it, if you have some insights that can move my team forward.

We introduced two-way sync with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket etc recently so you can keep your Postman collections inside version control while being able to work with them inside Workspaces. Details here: https://blog.postman.com/the-reimagined-api-first-workflow-f...

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#193

Post by a85 » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 1:10 AM UTC

ynouri wrote: post #186

lysium wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do version control with your postman scripts? That was the biggest issue on my last project. Plus, if the API moves, we had to (manually) find and fix dozens of Postman tests. I'd appreciate it, if you have some insights that can move my team forward.

We face a similar situation and we sometimes introduce API changes that break the monitors, which then requires to manually fix the testing script. The pain hasn’t been big enough yet to make us search for a different solution. Note that we are using Monitors mostly for end to end, user like tests, which represents a small fraction when compared to our unit test suite covering the API (where tests tend to be quite E2…

You can do a 2-way sync now! https://blog.postman.com/the-reimagined-api-first-workflow-f...

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#194

Post by a85 » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 1:13 AM UTC

serverholic wrote: post #56

How about better graphql support? Insomnia is kicking postman's but in that department and my team had to switch.

Many many improvements coming soon to GraphQL tooling in Postman.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#195

Post by sharat87 » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:25 AM UTC

avel wrote: post #68

As I have also been frustrated with the direction Postman has taken, I have a great alternative to suggest, if the only thing you want to do is fire requests on demand easily and do not need automated testing. The VS Code Rest Client extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... is great for testing and debugging APIs. You create a "my_request.http" file that contains something like POST h…

Shameless plug: There's also Prestige at https://prestigemad.com, which is very similar but works right in the browser. You can save your files as Gists as well. Templating with variables is also supported with `${}` syntax, like Javascript's template strings.

But gRPC support is not built yet. It's on the roadmap.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#196

Post by gravypod » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 3:08 AM UTC

a85 wrote: post #146

Postman founder here. Thank you HN community for highlighting this feature. We have been seeing gRPC usage exploding especially in microservices driven architectures and we are looking forward to the feedback we get on the feature. A few other observations on comments that I read through: 1. Postman leans towards adding UI affordances instead of hiding them. This can irritate experienced developers at times who alrea…

Are you planning on supporting importing the proto .bin format that stores file descriptors? This is the output of the proto compiler and would make it easier to provide a full transitive closure of deps for people who have complex build phases. You could also make a bazel rule set for exposing `bazel run //service/proto:postman` with default configs.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#197

Post by nichos » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 4:57 AM UTC

avel wrote: post #68

As I have also been frustrated with the direction Postman has taken, I have a great alternative to suggest, if the only thing you want to do is fire requests on demand easily and do not need automated testing. The VS Code Rest Client extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... is great for testing and debugging APIs. You create a "my_request.http" file that contains something like POST h…

There's also insomnia: http://insomnia.rest/

Which is an open source, cross platform alternative to postman.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#198

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 8:23 AM UTC

avel wrote: post #68

As I have also been frustrated with the direction Postman has taken, I have a great alternative to suggest, if the only thing you want to do is fire requests on demand easily and do not need automated testing. The VS Code Rest Client extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... is great for testing and debugging APIs. You create a "my_request.http" file that contains something like POST h…

I too like this approach, because the format is simple and text-based and you can maintain it in your git repository.

My main gripe with Postman and Insomnia isn't actually the web based UI, but the lock-in. You can't access the files that they store their data in easily. Postman especially tries to push people towards getting their per-seat 'cloud' subscription if you want to share sets of HTTP requests.

But using this text-based REST client, you don't have this file lock-in.

For IntelliJ this feature is actually built in, I believe it uses the same syntax.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#199

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 8:27 AM UTC

I've posted this in a reply comment but here's a top level comment as well.

The main reason I dislike Postman is not actually the web based interface, but the fact it keeps its data files to itself to try and push teams to using their cloud offerings.

If a HTTP client stores its requests and configuration as a plain text file, it becomes really easy to manage it alongside a codebase and share between teams. But alas.

That said, I have seen a paid version of postman be used in a company and it worked really well. But it's an expense.

An alternative is what is mentioned in the top comment at this time, VS Code's Rest Client or Intellij's built-in rest client, which use plain text files (.http files) with plain text based HTTP request definitions. Those can be executed directly, without hidden functionality, and stored / updated / diffed in git.

Another alternative - but this is restricted to HTTP based APIs - is Swagger/OpenAPI combined with Swagger-UI, which is both a documentation page and a demo page. The UX isn't the best, but it works very well imo.

Re: Postman Now Supports gRPC

#200

Post by test-account » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 11:02 AM UTC

nexuist wrote: post #92

judge2020 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can it do substitution with some sort of application-based KV store? The main reason I used a rest client like Insomnia is so that I can reference secrets like {{ client_secret }} or {{ api_key }} and have a change to the value in the KV store reflect for every request.

Yes, it seems like it: "We support two types of variables, one is Custom Variables which is defined by user and can be further divided into Environment Variables, File Variables and Request Variables, the other is System Variables which is a predefined set of variables out-of-box." However, what I can't figure out is if it supports programmatic variable setting. I have an API where I need to retrieve a token from an…

You can do it with intelij