Using Postman for API Testing

Postman for API Testing

Postman is a platform for working with web APIs. Originally focused on just testing, the Postman platform now offers support for generating documentation, spinning up API mock servers, and even designing APIs. For this course, we’re focusing on the basic testing features. However, we encourage you to explore Postman, because it may be able to solve some other challenges we’ve discussed previously around designing, prototyping, and documenting APIs.

We can start using Postman for free. However, we’ll need a valid Postman user account in order to create, store, and manage our test collections.

Note: Refer to the appendix on how to create an account and install the Postman client on your local workstation.

First, we have to create our Postman account and install the Postman client application locally or open www.postman.com in a web browser to use it online. Once we do that, we can get started creating and running our API tests. When we first open Postman, we’re taken to the main screen, as shown in the following screenshot. We can start creating collections and tests right away. But before we do, we need to sign in when we start the Postman client for the first time.