Postman provides you with a number of building blocks that you can use to put together various kinds of API testing. Once you are logged in, you can start creating API requests.
The free account is helpful for being able to integrate some of the online capabilities of Postman (like sharing and viewing reports) with the tests that you run locally. You can create a free account at this point. The first time you open it Postman will ask you to sign in. Simply open the Postman app that you just installed. Once you have downloaded it simply run the installer as you would any other program and within minutes you will have Postman installed and ready to go on your computer. There are versions for Windows, Linux and Mac. The easiest way to do that is to go to and download the version for the OS you are on.
Originally Postman was a simple Chrome extension, but it has become more powerful and has become a full fledged desktop application and so in order to get started with API Testing using Postman you will need to install it. It also has many other features for interacting with and improving APIs. Postman is a powerful API testing tool that enables exploratory and automated API testing. One of the tools that work well for this is Postman. Because they are programming interfaces, we do need the help of tools in order to test them effectively. Testers are used to thinking about the UI or User Interface when they think about software, but APIs are also interfaces that need testing. and they tell the server whether we are trying to retrieve information or what kinds of modifications we would like the application to do. These methods are things like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. Endpoints define some kind of resource on a server that we want information about. We don’t need to get into what all those guidelines are here, but what these guidelines mean is that we can expect to be able to call REST APIs in certain ways.įor REST API testing we will need to specify an endpoint that we want to use. These APIs follow a certain set of guidelines. The most common type of API you will see when testing modern internet applications is a REST API. There are many APIs available and companies provide APIs externally that let you programmatically interact with their services (think Twilio, Stripe, or Plaid for example). Essentially an API is just an interface that defines the ways that scripts or programs can communicate with an application or service.
Even when a UI is available, API tests often execute more quickly, break less frequently, and allow for more flexibility in a microservices environment.Īs we’ve covered in our other series, Postman is the most popular tool when it comes to API testing. When interfacing with external applications, API testing is critical, and API testing is becoming a requirement for the internal parts of your application as well. API testing is a critical function for most modern web and mobile applications.