Replacing Postman
August 12, 2021
Long break from coding, but I’m back! I’ve picked up two projects—one for work and the other I started back in January.
In working on these, I came across a great improvement that seems to have been birthed while I was gone! Now there are some great VS Code extensions which let you test API endpoints without needing to use an external client like Postman:
REST Client
I came across this magic in this video. This extension lets you create a .rest or .http file in your root directory and run REST requests directly from that file. The result will open in a new tab in the editor.
I started using this one and it’s really great because the .rest file basically becomes a forever test file for each route. I guess I could also write tests… 😅🙈
Thunder Client
This is another good-looking one that got a mention in this video. This extension seems to be an experience closer to using Postman, and might be a good option if you like the Postman GUI.
I decided to try REST Client first because I liked the option to save all endpoints in one file…not sure you can do that in Thunder Client.
It will be interesting to see what else I missed during my coding hiatus!