from Hacker News

Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

by kermire on 10/21/22, 12:06 PM with 182 comments

Last time I posted this it didn't garner much interest. There have been lots of improvements and fixes since the last release.

Quick list of features:

  - Workspaces
  - Tabs
  - Nested Folders
  - Lots of context menus
  - Response history
  - Plugins
  - Runs fully in the browser and runs offline if necessary
  - Chrome and Firefox extension to bypass CORS restrictions
  - Desktop builds for all platforms
  - GraphQL support
  - Import collections exported from Postman and Insomnia
  - Simple user friendly interface
I built this because I love Insomnia but wanted a portable version that I could run in the browser.

If you're tired of Postman's bloated interface and slow startup times, do give this a try.

  • by mch82 on 10/21/22, 1:59 PM

    Cool project! A true, open source alternative to Postman will be valuable. It seems like you’ve got the major elements in place.

    Unsolicited UX notes…

    I read Hacker News on mobile, so tried the app on mobile and ran into some challenges. In order to save space, eliminate the right click, and work on mobile please consider changing:

        You can right click here to create a new request or a new folder
    To the following (illustrated using pseudo markdown):

        [Create request] or [Create a folder]
    It would also be helpful to replace the GitHub star link with a link to your README. GitHub star links are problematic because they require a login that adds friction that prevents people from getting to your README page. People will login if they decide to star the project, but they might never get to your GitHub if they don’t have time to login or can’t easily login on the device where they’re reading.

  • by kcartlidge on 10/21/22, 8:33 PM

    > Last time I posted this it didn't garner much interest.

    Looks good. I use Postman daily and it sucks, so always open to alternatives.

    I don't recall what it looked like the last time you posted, but I wonder if part of the low interest is because upon arrival it doesn't instantly jump out to the visitor that this is something you can host/run locally. It's very easy to miss the Github links top right. And if you don't realise that, then what you see is a third party website expecting you to send your development requests through their UI, which is off-putting.

    As I say, I don't remember, but that may be why I skipped it last time. I'll pay more attention this time!

    (Edit: split paragraphs for clarity)

  • by si1entstill on 10/21/22, 3:04 PM

    I switched to "vscode-restclient" about a year ago and never looked back. It has variables, everything is saved as text, and I can commit my request suite to source control for collaboration's sake.

    https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

  • by jicea on 10/22/22, 10:03 AM

    There are really goods suggestions in this thread, I just made a compilation of all the links posted (at this time):

    Restfox https://restfox.dev/

    bruno https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

    Hoppscotch https://hoppscotch.io/

    Hit https://hit.yolo42.com/

    HTTP Client https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...

    Hurl https://hurl.dev

    Insomnia https://github.com/Kong/insomnia

    Kreya https://kreya.app

    Milkman https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman

    Nap https://github.com/davesheldon/nap

    Paw https://paw.cloud

    restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

    REST Client https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

    Socketfox https://socketfox.dev

    Step CI https://stepci.com

    vim-http-client https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client

    vscode-restclient https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

    verb https://github.com/federicotdn/verb

  • by barbazoo on 10/21/22, 3:45 PM

    Postman is the new Dropbox in terms of useless features for the sake of growth or whatever.

  • by tgv on 10/21/22, 1:36 PM

    Nice. If you want to implement another feature: see the error response. My server returned 428, but I couldn't see the contents nor header, only a generic "preview".

  • by gquiniou on 10/21/22, 2:05 PM

    A nice feature would be import and export from/to Curl commands. When collaborating with clients or even colleagues it's easier to send curl commands.

  • by maxloh on 10/22/22, 1:19 AM

    What's the difference between Restfox and https://github.com/Kong/insomnia ?

    Seems both of them are Postman alternative.

  • by sphars on 10/21/22, 5:34 PM

    Any chance of the ability to do web sockets? Postman has started supporting this recently (in beta) but I really don't want to use Postman.

    Any other suggestions for web socket testing clients also welcome.

  • by mmis1000 on 10/22/22, 4:47 AM

    I think the whole point of people still use postman today is a easy way the sync between users or manage user that have access to the workspace. There are a lot of alternatives without such features. But with such feature? Not too much.

  • by Aperocky on 10/21/22, 6:02 PM

    > - Runs fully in the browser and runs offline if necessary

    Couldn't understand why this isn't the default.

    curl is always available and slapping a display layer on top of something like curl shouldn't need to talk to some backend server.

  • by Zamicol on 10/21/22, 2:49 PM

    The offline part is critical for me. The only other thing I would prefer is an application that doesn't use Electron.

  • by edpichler on 10/21/22, 1:44 PM

    Be careful with Postman. It seems they upload all your secrets to their servers. We stopped to use it a time ago. I don't know if they changed in this regard.

  • by snarfy on 10/22/22, 1:25 PM

    If I just need to make a simple POST or PUT I'll use Firefox's dev tools network tab. Right click a request and click 'Edit and resend'. If I need more than that I'll use vscode restclient.

  • by roamerz on 10/21/22, 3:54 PM

    Nice work! I wasn't familiar with insomnia so when I read your first line there I read it as "I love not being able to sleep because it gave me time to code this project..."

  • by yewenjie on 10/22/22, 1:10 AM

    If you live in Emacs, there is the amazing verb package that does the same, it supports org-mode primarily and also integrates with org-babel nicely.

    https://github.com/federicotdn/verb

  • by cloverr20 on 10/22/22, 7:39 AM

    I have moved from postman to https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client and have never looked back ever since, its opens in vim and has variables to store values and can store comments too in a .txt file along with the http calls. Give this a try if you are using vim.

  • by markcollin on 10/22/22, 9:46 AM

    Nice to the tools come out to save us from postman bloat

    I have been recently trying out bruno - https://www.github.com/usebruno/bruno

    It allows me to save my collection on my filesystem (as folders and files) and I use git to save them in my private repo

  • by mrcaramelpants on 10/21/22, 12:54 PM

    Nice, I wonder how it compares to hoppscotch.io

  • by ndimares on 10/24/22, 7:10 AM

    Wha's always boggled me about Postman is that it doesn't have autosave. It's 2022, what doesn't have autosaving? So thank you for adding auto-saving, huge improvement on Postman!

  • by compuguy on 10/22/22, 6:21 PM

    This certainly looks promising, though the only thing I can see its missing that Postman does is allowing the use of domain specific certificate authentication and the use of a user provided certificate chain.

  • by ushakov on 10/21/22, 3:34 PM

    If you want something like Restfox but as a CLI, that tests your APIs automatically, give Step CI a try

    https://stepci.com

    It’s free and open-source on GitHub!

    Disclaimer: I’m the author

  • by jhoelzel on 10/21/22, 2:46 PM

    I like it but please dont make me right click to do something! please add a little plus or something like it.

    Otherwise great work! needs a little disclaimer though that you will not save any of my requests =)

  • by user3939382 on 10/21/22, 2:07 PM

    My biggest gripe with Postman is the horrible theming. Except for light and dark, 0 control over the appearance of this app that I have to look at for hours almost every day.

  • by jcuenod on 10/21/22, 2:51 PM

    InvalidStateError: A mutation operation was attempted on a database that did not allow mutations.

    [Edit]: I'm on Firefox (with ublock origin). I see others having issues too.

  • by npalli on 10/21/22, 6:29 PM

    Tried to just GET www.google.com; says error and suggests bypassing with some plugins. Don't think I want to continue further.

  • by alfor on 10/21/22, 2:04 PM

    I don’t understand, what is it, what does it do?

  • by schipplock on 10/21/22, 6:55 PM

    In the past I was using SoapUI. I liked it. Just because you guys were mentioning Postman alternatives :).

  • by v3ss0n on 10/21/22, 8:06 PM

    Importing of postman is very important feature, I will take a look definitely.

  • by jdthedisciple on 10/21/22, 5:33 PM

    Entering "news.ycombinator.com" and pressing send gives me an error.

  • by snehesht on 10/21/22, 3:20 PM

    Noticed a small bug, I can't paste into the URL bar.

  • by josephd79 on 10/24/22, 1:35 PM

    Paw for mac users, native client.

  • by jcuenod on 10/21/22, 4:46 PM

    Is there a way to get it to ignore the cache?

  • by iWelly on 10/22/22, 1:44 AM

    - Nested Folders

  • by humility on 10/22/22, 5:15 AM

    what's wrong with hoppscotch?

  • by Snacklive on 10/21/22, 1:44 PM

    Page is not working for me. I'm in Firefox

  • by shubham_sinha on 10/21/22, 4:26 PM

    Postman, Insomnia, Paw seem to fall in similar league. But if you are running VSCode simply use Thunderclient.

  • by imagineerschool on 10/21/22, 1:05 PM

    Cool!

  • by simjnd on 10/21/22, 7:07 PM

    Hoppscotch [1][2] (previously Postwoman) is also a very nice free and open-source Postman alternative.

    [1]: https://hoppscotch.io/

    [2]: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

  • by jetter on 10/21/22, 3:02 PM

    If you are a minimalist, and are using VS Code, try https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... which is a pure text syntax to describe API requests, and execute them right from the editor window. I now have api.http text file in every API-first project I am building and I love it.

  • by _jayhack_ on 10/21/22, 5:08 PM

    For anyone looking for an aesthetic Postman alternative, I can't recommend https://insomnia.rest/ enough

  • by gregwebs on 10/21/22, 9:43 PM

    I have been trying out https://hurl.dev and so far been really liking it. Plain text format, everything runs very quickly locally, it can capture data from previous requests to run workflows and serve as a testing tool.

  • by odiroot on 10/21/22, 6:23 PM

    I use https://kreya.app/. It is very lean and the only GUI client not using Electron, I could find.

  • by projproj on 10/21/22, 5:26 PM

    Here's an alternative I recently came across. In Firefox on the network tab of the dev console, right click on an XHR request. You'll have two relevant options: "Resend" and "Edit and Resend". Edit and Resend doesn't give you all the features of Postman, but it is useful and a lot easier. I have spent a lot of time in Postman just putting in all the headers and POST body to set up the API call. With this method in Firefox, all parameters are already set because it's an exact copy of the request you already sent. You can change params or just hit send when you're ready to retest something you're doing on the backend.

  • by progre on 10/21/22, 3:29 PM

    I'm just now migrating my postman collections to .rest text files and the REST-client plugin for vscode (that name is both good and bad at the same time btw, it like marketing a new car and naming it "Car").

    Grantet it does not do everything Postman does but I'm pretty happy so far. Environment variables and secrets stays in a workspace settings.json and the .rest files can be version controlled and shared.

    Always bet on text!

  • by SirIntruder on 10/22/22, 12:38 AM

    Sorry for a complete tangent - I've been assuming gray OP's text in ask/show meant people were downvoting a post and it always weirded me out - now had to double check to confirm it's simply always grayed out (why though?)

  • by mmgutz on 10/21/22, 11:04 PM

    If you're using VS Code and only need to test REST APIs, then try "Rest Client" extension by Huachao Mao. It does everything I used Postman for, using a text file. A quality of life changer.

  • by arunsivadasan on 10/21/22, 5:08 PM

    There was previously Postwoman which I believe is now hoppscotch https://github.com/f0rb1d/postwoman

    https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

  • by philliphaydon on 10/21/22, 1:58 PM

    I switched to insomnia when postman changed their pricing pulling the rug out from everyone wanting us to pay like $300 more per month. (Before they back tracked)

    https://insomnia.rest/

    I actually prefer it.

  • by HatchedLake721 on 10/21/22, 1:08 PM

    Switched away from Postman to a native Mac app and my RAM couldn't be happier (https://paw.cloud)

  • by duiker101 on 10/21/22, 1:44 PM

    My favorite testing HTTP Client is still just the IntelliJ built-in, pure text. You know exactly what you send without having to navigate menus and whatnot. In the end, 99% of HTTP requests are just that, text.

  • by LunicLynx on 10/21/22, 4:38 PM

    I would recommend VS Code with RestClient extension.

  • by stonecharioteer on 10/21/22, 4:03 PM

    Nothing to take away from all of this, but please learn cURL. Postman and all its alternatives are great and all, but they also hide a lot of things that will hinder your debugging skills. As an alternative try httpie. Not because CLIs are cool but because you can see the headers and the raw response more easily. Developers need to understand what content type is, what response headers are, how to limit them, how to tweak them. And the snippets that Postman provides are not always the right way to send requests in a given language

  • by NayamAmarshe on 10/21/22, 12:57 PM

    Why should I use this over https://hoppscotch.io ?

  • by Nihilartikel on 10/21/22, 1:42 PM

    My version of Postman is to open a Jupyter notebook and

    >> import requests

  • by Avlin67 on 10/21/22, 3:30 PM

    it is completly garbage on mobile

  • by inso1 on 10/21/22, 6:51 PM

    Hi I am one of the contributors to Insomnia. You guys are all invited to join our Slack channel and give us suggestions and feedback! https://chat.insomnia.rest/