Ask HN: What tool do you use to “call” your back-end APIs while developing?

by ramitmittal on 3/26/2021, 5:19:09 AM with 4 comments
Do you use something like Postman, Httpie, or plain-old Curl? How do you "check" or "test" the API endpoint you're writing? Do you use the testing framework and test the whole HTTP request/response cycle from the test itself?

  • by abunuwas on 3/31/2021, 10:11:44 AM

    It depends on what check I'm making. If I just want to make a quick check, that's cURL. If I'm making the same check repeatedly, I may use Postman or something similar so that I can easily save the request test. If I want to make sure the API endpoint is working correctly and returning responses in the expected format, I'd run Dredd tests. I love this question because it gives me an idea for a feature in an app I'm currently building to test APIs (https://www.microapis.io) - be able to run it against your local server and run tests against it.

  • by jonpalmisc on 3/26/2021, 2:29:41 PM

    HTTPie is really good if you aren’t doing anything super complex. Postman is a little more than I need nowadays. If you don’t want to leave your browser, there’s another tool called Hoppscotch which is similar to Postman. All are perfectly capable, just depends what you want to do and how you like to work.

  • by rubans on 3/26/2021, 8:35:47 AM

    https://www.postman.com/