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Best Alternative to Postman?
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this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
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Programming
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Curl. Everything you described is not hard to do via scripts. I use it every day for all of my API testing needs. You're also not limited to the features Postman provides.
This is like telling someone who needs a new table saw that they can use a handsaw.
Like sure it works great, but it's going to be a long process getting things done compared to something like postman.
It does not take long to use curl, not sure what you're talking about. There's not particularly special about what Postman does.
Like what?
I make backends, very complex, yet curl does it all, headers, files, any data, whatever.
Need to test an API? Swagger will help everyone.
You need reproducible tests? Write feature tests.
Need to do many requests to achieve a business goal? Put it into a script. Shell is sufficient for basic needs, use anything that can be interpreted for anything more complex. Though at that point you should have an app to handle distributed states, which is never a fun time.
If a person needs to process an entire kitchen worth of lumber, then yes, tablesaw. If, however, a person needs to build one simple box and also learn how the wood fits together and practice their skills, then handsaw.
xhis a nice modern alternative.What's not modern about curl?
It's almost 30 years old. Not to knock cURL, it's a staple for sure.
HTTPie and
xhclaim to have a more intuitive UX. If the functionality is comparable, I choose tools written in memory-safe languages by default.https://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-httpie.html
Httpie and xh only have a small subset of curl's functionality, and IMO the claims of more intuitive UX is dubious at best. More magical and limiting is what I would say. Httpie in particular is slow as hell, too.
Daniel has a more thorough comparison of features across different alternatives here: https://curl.se/docs/comparison-table.html
If being over 30 is "not modern", OK, sure, but that's a bit subjective.
The fuctionality is hardly comparable, cURL supports many protocols. As for memory safety it's trendy and modern but it hardly makes sense to rewrite such a project in a memory-safe language. It's been tried though (for some components) and the project lead's open to that.
How would you test a GraphQL API with curl?
EDIT: Nevermind I just looked it up and I'll just stick with postman for now.
The same way you test any other API. Not really different. I tend to keep my request bodies in separate files organized in folders to keep things tidy.