Why does every REST testing software want me to login?
Why does every REST testing software want me to login?
I just want to build requests and read the responses, why the hell does everyone suddenly want me to make an account?
It seems that way with a lot of REST clients for whatever reason.
It starts off as what we all want - a simple rest client, maybe storing environments and requests
Then companies start building more features to try and create a whole community or ecosystem
They start asking for account creation. Then team creation to share with your team. Then an enterprise plan. Then they gimp the original features and paywall them.
Looking at you, Postman, Insomnia, Thunderclient
The thing is, I kinda get it in a way. Like, having an account lets them offer so many more useful features, and over time they might just see it as not worth supporting two "types" of users, so they lean more on requiring an account.
Obviously, a lot of this is driven by execs trying to make their line go up, but even without that it does make sense to a point. Not that I agree with it at all, but I see how it would happen.
For a lot of use cases I find .http files very convenient. Here is a documentation from Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/test/http-files?view=aspnetcore-8.0
There is some standard around the .http extension so they work in many IDEs and they can be implemented into CI pipelines. The Microsoft documentation should be enough, though, to get you started.
https://github.com/usebruno/bruno
There is also https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch but the absence of offline local client was always a blocker
I've been using Bruno since Postman started asking for an account. It works but it does feel like I'm missing a lot of features.
@lorty I feel your pain; I had to switch from Postman to Insomnia because I couldn't use the local application anymore without creating an account, but even Insomnia is pushing to create an account somewhere.
https://github.com/ArchGPT/insomnium?tab=readme-ov-file
Works brilliantly. But, not maintained for some months now.
More than enough for me though.
@makingStuffForFun wow, just realized my build of Insomnia was 2023.5.8, (the exact version before they switched to logins). I'll have to grab a copy of insomnium. No concern that it may not be actively maintained; it's just a basic Electron app.
I wonder how hard it'd be to make a PWA and host it on GitHub 🤔 Maybe this would be a good yet-another-hobby-project-ill-never-complete to pick up
Intellijs build in HTTP client is good enough for me to use it for my testing purposes and even for short one-off thing I previously might've done with curl.
Use restfox
https://curl.se/ has been account free since 1998.
Never understood why people keep trying to use proprietary tools for this, especially when curl is so good.
I have a directory of shell scripts I use to test out endpoints. I persist request/response data either with environment variables or regular files. Oh and since these are just shell scripts, it's pretty trivial to do stuff like iterate over a CSV (or JSON array) and make a request for each row, conditionally make requests, or whatever else you want.
Oh and honorable mention goes to
joandjqfor making it super easy to make/process JSON data.