Playing around with Postman

I have known of Postman for a while now - it's a tool you can use to explore and test APIs. I just never got down to using it much. That changed quite a bit in the last week or so.

I started playing around with it while exploring the Airtable API, and then the Twitter API this week. I also used it to create the docs for greetingsapi.com. Also, I didn't know Postman could generate docs and sample code for the endpoints automatically. Pretty cool.

Call me ignorant, but I didn’t realize that you can publish API docs using @getpostman.

What’s really cool is that it automatically generates sample code for a bunch of languages.

Just created a docs page for https://t.co/ZbfX6mTqKt

Check it out - https://t.co/ZlSfEG3NOB pic.twitter.com/Fy9ot2rOOl
— Amit Jotwani (@amit) April 20, 2022

Variables

I am still new to this concept in Postman, but it lets you created environment variables of sorts that you can use to make API calls without actually punching the API key etc for each of the endpoints.

Here's an example for Twitter API I was exploring yesterday. More about variables here on Postman's docs.

You then use it in the API call with {{variable_name}}.