Installing Postman

In this section, you're going to learn how to use Postman. Postman is an essential tool if you're building a REST API. I have never worked with a team or on a project where Postman was not heavily used by every developer involved. Postman lets you create HTTP requests and fire them off. This makes it really easy to test that everything you're writing is working as expected. Now obviously, we will also be writing automated tests, but using Postman lets you play around with data and see how things work as you move through your API. It really is a fantastic tool.

We're going to head over to the browser and go to getpostman.com, and here we can grab their application:

Now I'm going to be using the Chrome application. To install it, all you have to do is install the Chrome app from the Chrome store, click Add to Chrome, and it should bring you over to the page where you can open up the application. Now, to open up Chrome apps, you have to go to this kind of weird URL. It's chrome://apps. Here, you can view all of your apps, and we can just open up Postman by clicking it.

Now as I mentioned previously, Postman lets you make HTTP requests, so we're going to go ahead and make a few to play around with the user interface. You do not need to make an account, and you do not need to sign up for a paid plan. The paid plans are targeted towards teams of developers who need advanced features. We are just making basic requests on our machine; we don't need cloud storage or anything like that. I'm going to skip account creation, and we can go right to the application.

Here, we can set up our request; this is what happens in the panel:

And, in the white space, we'll be able to view the result. Let's go ahead and make a request to Google.