Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

recipeui.com

51–60 of 94 posts

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#51

This is nice! I am enjoying it so far. Earlier, I was trying to find Postman alternatives and I went back to Postman because of UI quirks. I found couple of issues with RecipeUI Following is the curl command I got from Postman export curl --location --globoff 'https://api.fly.io/prometheus/my-fly-app/api/v1/query?query=count(fly_instance_filesystem_blocks{app%3D~%22%5Ety-.*-.*%24%22%2C%20mount!%3D%22%2F%22}%20*%20fly…

Why were you looking for a Postman alternative? I thought it was open-source.

I'm using Thunder Client in VS Code at the moment, but if my needs become more complicated I don't want to invest in anything douchey.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many (most?) humans eschew Microsoft products

I feel like those days are long past.

Eh, no. They passed for a bit when Microsoft seemed to be playing nice and accepting the fact that the world has moved on from Windows.

Now they've regressed.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#53
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We forgot that video isn't always a medium that people prefer." I've recently encountered this same apparent strong preference for video at work (where I lead a platform team whose deliverables support dozens of other teams) and while I can accept it (and even embraced it as we create howto videos), it remains very strange to me. When engaging with new tech I always want to see code and well-organized prose, but i…

For people reading this, just remember that people who prefer videos over prose aren't hanging out in a text-only forum like this. There's some self-selection happening here. You should not automatically assume that most people prefer text over video!

No, but you can guess that people actually doing work and creating software do. I don't want to watch a fucking video when I can refer to actual documentation and potentially cut and paste some example code somewhere.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#54
post #49

The one piece of Postman that only Hoppscotch (a Postman fork) seems replicate that I definitely want is scripting. Often requests depend upon data from another, and being able to put things into the environment as you run different requests is super useful (even if you just use it for otherwise unsupported auth methods).

I didn't quite understand if you are aware, but Postman has scripting and can depend upon data from another. And even can query it serially if you add requests to folder, right click on folder and "Run folder".

Scripting is under Tests tab.

I've built oauth2 authorization flow to get the code and afterwards the access token.

First request Test script:

  pm.expect(pm.response.code).to.equal(302);
  var code = pm.response.body;
  var location = pm.response.headers.get("Location");
  if (location.match(/\\?code=([^&]+)/) === null) {
      postman.setNextRequest(pm.info.requestName)
      console.log("Request must be re-run. First time adfs wants to set some cookies, eh.")
  } else {
      var code = location.match(/\\?code=([^&]+)/)[1];
      pm.environment.set("oauth2_authorizationcode", code);
  }
Second request Test script:

  pm.environment.set("oauth2_accesstoken", pm.response.json().access_token);
  pm.environment.set("oauth2_refreshtoken", pm.response.json().refresh_token);
Scripting: https://learning.postman.com/docs/writing-scripts/script-ref...

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#55
post #15

Another alternative I've been meaning to try out: https://restfox.dev/

So comparing the two... Unique to Restfox - a nice "beautify json" button - in addition to response code and time, shows size and exact timestamp of response - Can drag and drop to reorganize folders and items in sidebar Unique to RecipeUI - TypeScript interface definitions - Generates cURL, Javascript and Python code snippets you can copy Probably other things, but these are what stood out.

Restfox works right in the browser, no additional downloads needed, it seems.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#56
post #37

After taking a quick look, I still don't know what this is, what Postman is, or who would use either, or for what. No doubt I could spend a bit more time to sort it out, but it would be nice to not have to. Perhaps leaving someone like me to wallow in his ignorance is just fine. But being very clear and concise about what is being offered, without relying on knowledge of another product, might attract more of the uni…

I've used it a lot whenever I've needed to integrate with a third party through a REST api. Postman for me is the playground where I build the queries and play with iteratively as I develop the integration.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#57
post #44

This needs a button to import an OpenAPI spec (2.0, 3.0, doesn't matter) and let the user go wild on his own APIs. I've never thought of an API exploration tool to be a marketplace of ready-baked API collections. The speed is there, the UI can be improved, the selling point is "wooosh" on me.

Yes. The OpenAPI ecosystem is in a shockingly shambolic state. I was charged with creating an API for my company's line of network-enabled products, so I defined it in OAS 3.1. But years after the ratification of this standard, pretty much no tools fully support it, and the code-generation toolchain is a pathetic joke. When I explored it further, I found that this state was well-known in the development community, an…

Yes, the tooling around OpenAPI spec is not great.

However we've worked around it. We write most of our spec by hand. We thought it would be horrible but it's not.

All our APIs accept and respond with JSON so the OpenAPI payloads are pretty much JSON schemas which means we can parse and load them up in our functional tests and automate the schema validation as part of a functional test suite. We catch a lot of unintended changes to API contract with this approach (customer is now customer_id because serializer decided so and stuff like that).

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#58
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue the offering is actually very clear. What is it?

My take: RecipeUI a Postman-like tool that offers convenient type safety and autocomplete on top of what Postman already does. What is Postman? It's a tool that allows you to configure, save, and replay HTTP requests. It helps developers building backend server APIs, so they don't have to keep fiddling around with their frontend. In many greenfield projects, the frontend doesn't even exist yet and Postman is effectiv…

Honestly I'm still not entirely sold on the idea of Postman, for sending a simple HTTP request I find the python requests library a lot more intuitive to work with.

Then again I'm mostly looking at APIs to eventually use them in some other python script so perhaps my use case is not the best fit.

Unless the API does something weird you can do a lot worse than using curl and bash. I mean even using telnet (or openssl s_client) is not too bad if you're only doing a simple GET.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#59

This is nice! I am enjoying it so far. Earlier, I was trying to find Postman alternatives and I went back to Postman because of UI quirks. I found couple of issues with RecipeUI Following is the curl command I got from Postman export curl --location --globoff 'https://api.fly.io/prometheus/my-fly-app/api/v1/query?query=count(fly_instance_filesystem_blocks{app%3D~%22%5Ety-.*-.*%24%22%2C%20mount!%3D%22%2F%22}%20*%20fly…

Why were you looking for a Postman alternative? I thought it was open-source. I'm using Thunder Client in VS Code at the moment, but if my needs become more complicated I don't want to invest in anything douchey.

Postman isn't free, it's proprietary and expensive (~19$ per user per month).

I don't use VS Code and didn't try VSC plugins but the FOSS alternatives are not up to the same level of quality of Postman. Hoppscotch (formerly Postwoman) has some bugs. The best tool I know and recommend is HTTPie the Desktop version (or CLI version for CLI lovers). It stills partly open-source, not a free software.

Re: Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take: RecipeUI a Postman-like tool that offers convenient type safety and autocomplete on top of what Postman already does. What is Postman? It's a tool that allows you to configure, save, and replay HTTP requests. It helps developers building backend server APIs, so they don't have to keep fiddling around with their frontend. In many greenfield projects, the frontend doesn't even exist yet and Postman is effectiv…

Honestly I'm still not entirely sold on the idea of Postman, for sending a simple HTTP request I find the python requests library a lot more intuitive to work with. Then again I'm mostly looking at APIs to eventually use them in some other python script so perhaps my use case is not the best fit. Unless the API does something weird you can do a lot worse than using curl and bash. I mean even using telnet (or openssl…

It definitely is. I am using curl and postman, but I never work(ed) in/with python apart from one course at university
Post reply on HN