Intro to Postman

In creating, deploying, and discovering APIs, there is always the need to test that the expected response meets the request sent. To ease this burden, I usually turn to Postman. Postman is a tool that let’s you try every feature of an API that you can think of a test for. Today’s blog is going to cover the basics to get you started.

To start, download Postman from the Chrome web store, and run it.

Once loaded, you can perform any number of verbs that you would expect: GET, PUT, POST, OPTIONS. For this blog, we will access the Department of Labor’s public API with a GET request, and my application expects the results to be returned in json. Accessing this API requires a mixture of parameters and headers to get the data back in a format that I can use. Luckily, Postman makes these values easy to add, delete, reorder, or update.

Now that I’ve fired off my request and received the response, I am able to view my results, the response code, and the time it took for all of this to complete.