What is Postman ?

Sahil More

5 min readSep 3, 2021

Introduction to Postman

Postman is a standalone software testing API (Application Programming Interface) platform to build, test, design, modify, and document APIs. It is a simple Graphic User Interface for sending and viewing HTTP requests and responses.
While using Postman, for testing purposes, one doesn’t need to write any HTTP client network code. Instead, we build test suites called collections and let Postman interact with the API.
In this tool, nearly any functionality that any developer may need is embedded. This tool has the ability to make various types of HTTP requests like GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and convert the API to code for languages like JavaScript and Python.

Why use Postman ?

Accessibility- One can use it anywhere after installing Postman into the device by simply logging in to the account.
Use Collections-Postman allows users to build collections for their API-calls. Every set can create multiple requests and subfolders. It will help to organize the test suites.
Test development- To test checkpoints, verification of successful HTTP response status shall be added to every API- calls.
Automation Testing-Tests can be performed in several repetitions or iterations by using the Collection Runner or Newman, which saves time for repeated tests.
Creating Environments- The design of multiple environments results in less replication of tests as one can use the same collection but for a different setting.
Debugging- To effectively debug the tests, the postman console helps to track what data is being retrieved.
Collaboration- You can import or export collections and environments to enhance the sharing of files. You may also use a direct connection to share the collections.
Continuous integration-It can support continuous integration.

Features of Postman

Send Requests and View Responses

Create and execute any REST, SOAP, and GraphQL queries from within Postman.

Define complex requests

URL-encoded — The default content type for sending simple text data
Multipart/form-data — For sending large quantities of binary data or text containing non-ASCII characters
Raw body editing — For sending data without any encoding
Binary data — For sending image, audio, video, or text files

Get up and running in seconds

Instead of creating calls manually to send over the command line, all you need is a Postman Collection. Import a collection directly or generate one with one click from:
An API schema in the RAML, WADL, OpenAPI, or GraphQL format
A data file containing the cURL commands

Inspect Responses

View the status code, response time, and response size. Postman’s automatic language detection, link and syntax highlighting, search, and text formatting make it easy to inspect the response body.

Visualize Your Data

Utilize powerful, simple visualizations

Go beyond parsing API JSON or XML responses. API consumers can get more from API data by taking advantage of prebuilt charts and graphs.

Build your own

Developers can harness HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS or bring in many of the available charting and graphing libraries to create rich visualizations.

Customizable

Tweak charts and visualizations to your liking with a little CSS and JavaScript knowledge.

Share with your team

Visualizations can easily be shared with others utilizing Postman Collections.

Manage Authentication

Support for multiple protocols

Postman provides built-in support authentication protocols, including OAuth 2.0, AWS Signature, Hawk Authentication, and more.

Manage cookies

Capture cookies returned by the server when making a request and save them for reuse in later requests. You can also create custom domains and add cookies to them.

Manage Certificates

View and set SSL certificates on a per domain basis. Once a client certificate has been added, it will automatically be sent with any future request to that domain sent over HTTPS. Postman supports:

— > SSL certificate validation
— > Custom root CA Certificate support
— > Client certificate support

More Than Just an API Client

Postman is packed with features that make it a powerful tool for API exploration and development.

Generate code snippets

Generate code snippets from your requests in a variety of frameworks and languages that you can use to make the same requests from your own application.

Keep track of request history

Postman stores all requests you send in the “History” tab, allowing you to experiment with variations of requests quickly without wasting time building a request from scratch.

Write tests in the Postman Sandbox

Use test and pre-request scripts to add dynamic behavior to requests and collections. This allows you to write test suites, build requests that can contain dynamic parameters, pass data between requests, and more.