Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman (opens in new tab)

I had been hoping to keep all of our APIs centralized in git and run the local (or cloud for our ENVs) from that repo, but it doesn't read any query/API/collection defs from file.

(Not to come off as demanding of OSS, it's a wonderful product, but unfortunately you have to dig deep to figure out the limitations.)

EDIT: Also, what I'd go with now is Thunder client for VS code leveraging API defs stored within each repo + the localized vars such as auth info.

The app has been buggy since its first major overhaul, and it now also has incredible feature bloat. It's hard to find what you want, and the UI is constantly pushing you to make use of features you don't want to use. It no longer works well as a scratchpad because they want you to organize everything into a full API IDE, which is not something I want or need.

A unique things that seperates bruno from the rest is that it is a "local first" api client.

The collections get stored as folders and files on your local files system (imagine git repo), thereby allowing the developers to use the version control of their choice.

Which ones (apart from alpine)? I thought curl was pretty much as basic as it got and is always there.

If curl can run locally, so should all of these tools.

Presuming it’s end-to-end, but don’t know about at rest encryption

Unless you work on a team that's standardized around it as a collaboration tool.

In the end, I think hurl [0] is nicer, because it’s open source and it’s a cli tool (and VS code also has a syntax highlighting plugin for it), making it editor independent.

[0]: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl

Personally what I do is I script out full API workflows in different files. So one file might login, then POST to add an object, then GET that object off an endpoint, then patch that endpoint, then trigger the GET object again.

Another workflow might login, upload an image, get that image, etc. For me the scripting is what makes this appealing.

But you could setup one file that documents and tests all your endpoints similar to Postman.

ETA: I just tried the functionality on Insomnia and I have to admit the UX is nicer. Just paste into the URL bar. Whereas with Postman it's CMD+O, Click on "Raw Text", click in textarea, paste, press import. Insomnia looks to have added OpenAPI support too (it was missing it last time I played with it) so maybe it's time to re-evaluate Insomnia

For those unfamiliar with these plugins, they allow you to simply write text files looking like:

    GET https://example.com/posts/5
    Accept: application/json

    POST https://example.com/posts
    Content-Type: application/json
    Authorization: Bearer abc

    {"title": "foo", "body": "bar"}

There are plenty of great alternatives: HTTPie is one I like. Haven't found a good alternative to CleanMyMac yet though.

It can consume swagger/openapi docs and generate calls. It can generate code snippets and cURL requests. You can extract values from one response body to use as a variable in another request, the built in features go on and on- and there’s a decent extension ecosystem/write your own.

Most importantly, it just works, and it works well and quickly, with pretty much any auth scheme I’ve ever had to deal with.

I’ve only got really a couple of nits with the stand-alone version.

I still can’t figure out how to make it “use the same auth scheme” for every single request globally. Each request requires the auth config, but this is solved by just copying an existing request and starting from that. This could very well be my lack of knowledge, though I feel like I know the tool well.

The .paw file is binary and doesn’t do well checked into source control if you’ve got more than one person using it.

The Teams version, which requires a monthly sub kinda/sorta mimics a git style branch strategy for merging different members changes and handles the team problem pretty well.

All in all though, it is absolutely and BY FAR the best request tool I’ve ever used. A great combination of simple just get out of the way and advanced automation strategies. I use it every day.

EDIT TO ADD:

I forgot to mention their license is still a lifetime license. I paid them $50, probably 6 years ago now, and have never been forced to pay them another dime. I’d pay per major version or do the IntelliJ perpetual fallback if it came to it, but I’ve never once been bait and switched (looking at you Tower2).

(No affiliation.)

It’s a solid app and worth it if you’ll use it a lot. I simply didn’t because piling things in there isn’t particularly valuable if it isn’t readily available to the people I work with.

Depends on how much you value a tool like this. And it's a one-time purchase for life, not a subscription.

Early days but would love some feedback if you get a chance to try it out.

  GET https://httpbin.org/get
  
  > {%
      client.global.set("my_cookie", response.headers.valuesOf("Set-Cookie")[0]);
  %}