Getting started with postman

Remarks#

This section provides an overview of what postman is, and why a developer might want to use it.

It should also mention any large subjects within postman, and link out to the related topics. Since the Documentation for postman is new, you may need to create initial versions of those related topics.

What is Postman?

Postman is an API Development Environment that helps people to build, test, document, monitor and publish documentation for their APIs.

The main features of Postman are

• Sending requests (with support for different authentication schemes, Cookies, certificates, headers, query parameters, request body and SOAP with/without WSDL) and debugging and saving responses.
• Organizing your APIs into groups called as Collections.
• Sharing and collaborating your Collections with your team.
• Writing tests. The test scripts can run pre-request, after a response has been received, and can have looping and branching concepts.
• The concept of variables to set and get. As well as globals environment variables.
• Test Automation using Collection Runs. The collections can also be exported and run in the command line using Newman as part of your build process.
• You can also schedule tests to be run in an automated fashion by using Postman Monitors.
• A way to auto-generate and customize your API documentation directly from your collections. It can be private, shared with your team, public and can also be set-up on your custom domain.
• Simulate a backend with Mock Servers.
• Integrations with services like Slack, Github, Bitbucket, Datadog, Keen.io, Microsoft Flow and several others.
• An API that lets you consume the data from Postman as part of your continuous integration and delivery processes.
• A way to import existing APIs from Swagger, RAML, cURL and several other tools.
• Auto-generation of code snippets in different languages from your APIs.
• Intercepting requests.
• Interactive History of all your requests.
• Access Control for your team and Single Sign On (SSO).
• Core open sourced components.

Getting Started

Postman is available as a native app for Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems.

To install Postman, go to the apps page and click Download for Mac / Windows / Linux depending on your platform.

The native app is the recommended approach to using Postman as per the official documentation.