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Just Use Curl

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Re: Just Use Curl

#11

Post by qsort »

deafpolygon wrote: post #3

I've been using curl, like forever. I don't understand the preoccupation for using postman, et. al. -- why pay for something that literally requires a little bit of light RTFM?

If you're doing a lot of requests for testing or some other purpose I could see an argument for a graphical interface. Curl is a masterpiece but it's not that simple to use. But again, we're in $current_year and I'd be surprised if "hey Claude, can you cook up a curl request to do this and that" doesn't work.

Re: Just Use Curl

#12

Post by cluckindan »

deafpolygon wrote: post #3

I've been using curl, like forever. I don't understand the preoccupation for using postman, et. al. -- why pay for something that literally requires a little bit of light RTFM?

Some people like to think about the problems related to the actual work instead of looking up CLI tool manpages when they need to do something once in a blue moon.

I use curl liberally and also tend to create scripts around it to perform common tasks, but I still get why someone would prefer a GUI.

Re: Just Use Curl

#14

Post by c0balt »

> The UI/UX is perfect

While I like curl, this is highly subjective, some people just prefer a GUI that can guide you and/or be visually explored.

This whole piece also reads like someone is quite angry at people preferring a different workflow than them. Some aspects, like shell history, are also not the magic bullet they propose here as it doesn't, e. G., cover the actual responses.

Curl's ability to do almost everything is a minor curse here too as it means that any documentation (man pages, options help) is very large.

Re: Just Use Curl

#16

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #5
deafpolygon wrote: post #3

I've been using curl, like forever. I don't understand the preoccupation for using postman, et. al. -- why pay for something that literally requires a little bit of light RTFM?

I use both. It's quite convenient to have all the collections available and just send the request with a couple of clicks.

For repeated commands, my projects have a Make/Just file that has cURL commands I wanna validate. Sometimes I even load JSON from a tests/fixtures/*.json file, that also can be reused for other non-E2E tests.

Not sure how some developers could be so allergic to the terminal, don't you already spend a lot of time there?

Re: Just Use Curl

#17

Post by taylodl »

Curl and jq are plenty to get the job done. As the author points out, you can capture all your curl commands in scripts and then orchestrate with other scripts for testing purposes. On top of all the benefits the author has already mentioned, you get a boost if you're doing your development work in a VM, as I do. It's less you have to install, configure, and manage. Sure, that can be automated, but it's just more stuff you have to take care of and the longer you have to wait for a fresh VM to be ready.

Re: Just Use Curl

#18

Post by pjc50 »

deafpolygon wrote: post #3

I've been using curl, like forever. I don't understand the preoccupation for using postman, et. al. -- why pay for something that literally requires a little bit of light RTFM?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software." -- on why Dropbox should not exist.

People absolutely will pay for software rather than reading or thinking, if it makes doing the work easier. You may have heard of this thing called chatgpt.

(not being a web developer, I've only lightly used Postman, and it is definitely handy for things like authentication. Especially once you touch OAuth. But I uninstalled it once they went unnecessarily cloud)

Re: Just Use Curl

#19

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

qsort wrote: post #11
deafpolygon wrote: post #3

I've been using curl, like forever. I don't understand the preoccupation for using postman, et. al. -- why pay for something that literally requires a little bit of light RTFM?

If you're doing a lot of requests for testing or some other purpose I could see an argument for a graphical interface. Curl is a masterpiece but it's not that simple to use. But again, we're in $current_year and I'd be surprised if "hey Claude, can you cook up a curl request to do this and that" doesn't work.

Even simpler and free: `tldr curl` in your terminal gives you like 80% of what you need for day to day requests, `man curl` gives you 100% of what you need.

Re: Just Use Curl

#20

Post by forgetfulness »

Havoc wrote: post #6

> It's already on your machine, dipshit Does anyone actually enjoy this uhm style of writing?

13 years old me, back when Maddox offered a very fresh and novel form of content you could grab on your way through the Information Superhighway
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