Bruno and Postman

Once you’ve outgrown pasting curl commands into Slack, you need somewhere to keep a set of requests and swap environments. There are two broad choices.

What differs link

Choose Bruno if you want requests committed alongside the code, Postman if you need an API portal for the wider company.

Getting started with Bruno link

  brew install --cask bruno
  

Creating a collection produces folders and .bru files. Commit them.

  api/
  bruno.json
  environments/
    local.bru
    prod.bru
  users/
    list-users.bru
    create-user.bru
  

.bru files are text, so diffs are readable.

  meta {
  name: Create user
  type: http
}

post {
  url: {{baseUrl}}/users
  body: json
}

headers {
  Authorization: Bearer {{token}}
}

body:json {
  {
    "name": "Alex Kim",
    "email": "alex@example.com"
  }
}
  

Environment variables link

Moving between local, staging, and production only changes the URL and the token. Split those into environment files.

  vars {
  baseUrl: https://api.example.com
}
vars:secret [
  token
]
  

Anything under vars:secret is not written to the file, so tokens never get committed. Never put a production token in an ordinary variable.

Adding tests link

Each request can carry a script that validates the response.

  test("returns 201", function() {
  expect(res.getStatus()).to.equal(201);
});

test("has an id", function() {
  expect(res.getBody().id).to.be.a("string");
});
  

Run the whole collection from the CLI and it works in CI too.

  npm install -g @usebruno/cli
bru run --env local
  

Postman’s equivalent is newman.

  npm install -g newman
newman run collection.json -e local-env.json
  

Migrating link

Export a Postman collection and import it into Bruno. Both also accept a pasted curl command and turn it into a request.

Next link

To expose a locally built API for a moment → Exposing a Local Server