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Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

insomnia.rest

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Re: Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

#11
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plugging a competitor here, but I believe Postman has the ability to generate documentation.

And it can also generate program code for a lot of languages, curl or wget requests etc, and is has the interceptor plugin.. cant really be beaten at this time...

Postman has a tonne of features, but this also makes the UI more difficult to learn an use. This is one of the reasons I created Insomnia.

P.S. Insomnia also has code generation https://insomnia.rest/documentation/code-snippets/

Re: Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

#12
post #10

Hi, is this a native (objective c / swift) OS X or just a web frame? What are you main goals as far as being different from Paw, which is what I use and love thus far? *edit: oh and congratulations on getting your app out there :)

Thanks for the question! Insomnia is an Electron app built with with a mix of React and Elm. As an independent developer wanting to reach all platforms, Electron was basically the only option for me. And, as a web developer, it's been a super productive development environment.

The goal for Insomnia is to build a REST client that's easy to learn and a joy to use. I looked into other REST clients before starting Insomnia and found them to be cluttered and complicated. Paw was my favourite, but I needed something cross-platform so was unable to use it.

Re: Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

#13
post #8

I've been using Postman/Newman for testing and really liking it overall. One thing I'd love to see in one of these apps is the ability to use web sockets in tests.

Great suggestion. Websocket support is definitely something I've been thinking about adding later on. I'd love to hear any suggestions you have on what a websocket testing workflow would look like.

Re: Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

#15
Yes! I've been using Insomnia since it was a Chrome extension and the new 3.0 release is an amazing upgrade. I strongly agree with the developer that tools like Postman are quite bloated and complex for normal development tasks. Insomnia is very lightweight and refreshing!

Re: Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

#17
I find the visual design appealing, and at a cursory glance, the list of features decent. A few questions:

- Is there a way to override the cookies of a single request? Or do you have to edit the cookie jar and the corresponding cookies get auto-sent (ie. no override)

- For authorization, do you have built-in support for OAuth 2.0 access/refresh token flows? What about OAuth 1 ?

- Do you support HTTP/2?

Re: Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

#18
post #16

How is it compared to Postman?

I covered this a little bit in the comments below, but one of the reasons I created Insomnia was because I found other tools (including Postman) to be hard to learn and use. So, for me, the main advantage is having a clean and simple (but still powerful) interface. Insomnia also has a Linux desktop app, which makes it one of the only REST clients to support all three major platforms.

Insomnia is still in early stages, so if you have any feedback or suggestions I'd love to hear!

Re: Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

#19
post #17

I find the visual design appealing, and at a cursory glance, the list of features decent. A few questions: - Is there a way to override the cookies of a single request? Or do you have to edit the cookie jar and the corresponding cookies get auto-sent (ie. no override) - For authorization, do you have built-in support for OAuth 2.0 access/refresh token flows? What about OAuth 1 ? - Do you support HTTP/2?

Thanks for the compliment! Having good UI/UX was my first goal for Insomnia so I'm glad to see it's working.

- there is no way to override cookies per request yet, but that's good feedback :) - I'm working on OAuth support soon so keep an eye out for that - HTTP/2 support isn't in the works yet, but is on the roadmap

Thanks for the comment!

Re: Insomnia 3.0 – A simple and beautiful REST API client

#20
A lot of people here have been mentioning Postman but my personal go-to has been Advanced Rest Client [1]. It's open source, has Google Drive integration, and seems to have a pretty impressive development rate. For me, it's a definite plus that there isn't a paid tier so the developers don't have any incentive to limit the free product. That said, Insomnia looks like a nice contender and I look forward to giving it a shot. The reuse of variables across requests and the automatic generation of boilerplate request code both look like really nice features that ARC lacks!

[1] https://advancedrestclient.com/

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