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Show HN: Open-source Postman alternative with type safety

recipeui.com

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

#71

Post by JoBrad »

contravariant wrote: post #58
jabbawookiees wrote: post #45

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…

Postman is great for sharing API collections with others, especially if they aren’t a developer. Adding type safety to it is a great way to provide hints for acceptable values.

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

#72

Post by JoBrad »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #53
yen223 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I happen to know other folks who also “actually do work” who prefer watching a video explainer. I usually prefer text, but sometimes people document features better in vocal conversation vs writing.

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

#73

Post by thiht »

ta8645 wrote: 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…

> what Postman is

You're just not the target. No harm in that.

> But being very clear and concise about what is being offered

It already is, the huge screenshot and the verbiage used ("the open source Postman alternative with type safety") makes it pretty clear what it's about for people who might be interested.

I don't believe everything needs to be understandable by everyone. You don't need to "sell" specialized tooling to people who don't know what it's for.

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

#74

Post by ushakov »

amne wrote: post #57
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uninte…

You can also use your OpenAPI spec to generate tests for the API

eg. with Step CI (https://stepci.com): https://docs.stepci.com/import/openapi.html

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

#75

Post by ushakov »

_cenw wrote: 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).

Hoppscotch is not a Postman fork as far as I know.

You can do request chaining with Step CI (https://stepci.com) and Hurl (https://hurl.dev)

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

#76

Post by dvngnt_ »

_ache_ wrote: post #59
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also insomnia

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

ushakov wrote: post #75
_cenw wrote: 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).

Hoppscotch is not a Postman fork as far as I know. You can do request chaining with Step CI ( https://stepci.com ) and Hurl ( https://hurl.dev )

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by Volbohel »

konaraddi wrote: post #35

Your experience at Robinhood is relatable but I’m not sure I follow how RecipeUI would benefit us more than Postman. Our team has OpenAPI specs but we have a rough time sending requests because each team member has valid requests for some subset of the API surface of a given service (from working on subsets of the service) and there isn’t a common repository for valid requests covering the entire surface area. On top…

Currently, we're not convincing enough for the team use case that tackles many of the things you're describing (especially auth). Thanks for the feedback!!!

We're closely working on an API Storybook that'll be more native to a codebase and a service. Would love to reach out and hear more about your Postman experience!

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

#79

Post by Volbohel »

WizardClickBoy wrote: post #65

Any plans to add GraphQL support? Feels like it would be a great match, since in many cases you can fetch the schema directly from the URL.

GraphQL is in our timeline for the next 2 weeks! Let us know if you have a favorite GraphQL API so we can add it in our public collection.

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

#80

Post by arek_nawo »

I've seen quite a few Postman alternatives pop up recently (quite curious what's the reasoning behind that?). Currently I'm mostly using Hoppscotch - also open-source with pretty sweet UI, and Thunder Client in VS Code.

That said, I'd consider switching for type-safety (or more specifically auto-completion) if there was an ability to e.g. import existing OpenAPI schema and automatically pick up the types.

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