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Show HN: New way to test APIs with OpenAPI and Postman

by gertjandewilde on 7/15/21, 3:19 PM with 17 comments

  • by piokoch on 7/16/21, 8:48 AM

    My problem with Postman is that is very expensive for what it provides. It is $12 per user per month. Microsoft 365 Personal that comes with 1T of storage and all the standard office applications costs $7, business plan starts from $5 to $12 (If only MS Teams was a little better product...).

    IntelliJ costs $150 per year and it gives way more value than some tool that can just run tests and allow to share them between people.

    Postman has some convenience to run quickly REST call, right, but for anything more serious it is more productive to use Robotframework or after a bit of writing glue code in Java JUnit + Restassured. Everything is in the code, easily versioned.

    I don't know how to achieve in Postman tests versioning (different version of a test for a product version or different tests for new API version), probably this can be somehow simulated with environments, etc. but for me this is hacky and hard to maintain. I guess people just copy-paste a collection for new version.

  • by pan69 on 7/15/21, 6:49 PM

    I've started using Restclient, a VS Code plugin [1]. It allows me to easily add test scripts/requests to my normal GitHub workflow and share them with team mates.

    [1] https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

  • by tomlagier on 7/15/21, 4:31 PM

    Very cool! We use Postman collections extensively to internally document our APIs and make handoff between frontend and backend easier. We're waffling a bit on backend schema (currently using Yup & Typescript to export request/response types, but no formal definition), but seeing this makes me think it might be worth investing in a migration to OpenAPI, just to ease documentation.

  • by palijer on 7/15/21, 5:38 PM

    This seems really cool, but I'm curious about the ethics of creating a tool that seems to replace Postman's paid offerings while leveraging all the free features of Postman.

    I'm new to software development though, and I don't have an exact understanding of how open and sharing things are, and while I do understand we are all standing on the shoulders if giants, I wonder how far that goes.

    Maybe I'm misunderstanding though, but this seems to be solving a lot of the collaboration issues that exist on the free tier, that they sell for Enterprise postman.

    But once again, I'm new to the culture.

  • by gravypod on 7/15/21, 4:56 PM

    I've been very interested in using containers to have reproducable test environments in the past. I've built something for this: https://bunt.build

    I am interested in seeing the configuration leveraging happening in your project though. Very cool.

  • by crucialfelix on 7/15/21, 4:59 PM

    We have fully generated open API for our backend and public API. I've used cypress to test API endpoints but this requires manual setup and lots of work to collect examples.

    I look forward to checking this out. We had a breakage in our public API this week because we didn't have full test coverage.

  • by gertjandewilde on 7/15/21, 6:16 PM

  • by slava_kiose on 7/18/21, 11:51 AM

    A great solution. Personally, I really liked this solution. It seems to me that this is the best thing that I have met of this kind.

  • by jzig on 7/16/21, 2:33 AM

    I'm confused because Postman already generates a collection from an OpenAPI document. Does this do it differently somehow?

  • by nytgop77 on 7/15/21, 10:49 PM

    curl