Postman is an excellent tool for all kinds of developers. Here are 10 useful Postman tips and features of this swiss army knife.

1. Workspaces

You can create multiple workspaces to isolate all collections, environments, etc.

There are three different kinds of Postman workspaces for your different needs: personal workspaces, team workspaces, and public workspaces.

Workspaces on Postman

2. Environments and variables

An environment is a set of variables you can use in your Postman requests. You can use environments to group related sets of values together and manage access to shared Postman data if you are working as part of a team.

Create your environment (like local, test, pre-prod) variables in the Environments tab, then use them in your requests.

Define variables

Choose active environment

Choose active environment

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3. Running scripts

Suppose you have a login API to get a token. Then use this token in all your requests. You can create a test script and save tokens as environment variables. Now your token variable is updated after each successful login request.

Parse and set token from login response

You can also run scripts before each request with Pre-request Scripts

Pre-request Script

4. Inherit Authorization

Click the collection, select an authorization type from the Authorization tab. Fill in the requested fields.

Inherit Authorization

Choose Inherit auth from parent option for your request. Authorization is done for all your request.

Inherit auth from parent option

5. Run Automated Tests

Create assertion scripts (HTTP status code, response objects for all your request. Here is an example test to check if HTTP status code is 200 and the response JSON has userId:1 field.

Run Automated Tests

Running tests

Running tests

Select options and tests to run.

Test results

Check the documentation for more testing scenarios.

6. Examples

Examples show your API endpoints in action and provide additional details on exactly how requests and responses work. You can add an example to a request by saving a response, or you can create an example with a custom response to illustrate a specific use case.

Adding an example request

Saving a response as an example

7. Monitors

Postman Monitors give you continuous visibility into the health and performance of your APIs. Uptime monitors (open beta) enable you to keep watch on a single API endpoint, while collection-based monitors enable you to run API test scripts, chain together multiple requests, and validate critical API flows.

Configure a monitor

https://learning.postman.com/docs/monitoring-your-api/viewing-monitor-results/

8. Visualize Responses

The Postman Visualizer provides a programmable way to visually represent your request responses. Visualization code added to the Tests for a request will render in the Visualize tab for the response body, alongside the Pretty, Raw, and Preview options.

var template = `
<table bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
    <tr>
        <th>ID</th>
        <th>Title</th>
    </tr>
    {{#each response}}
    <tr>
        <td>{{id}}</td>
        <td>{{title}}</td>
    </tr>
    {{/each}}
</table>
`;

pm.visualizer.set(template, {
    // Pass the response body parsed as JSON as `data`
    response: pm.response.json()
});

Visualize Responses

https://learning.postman.com/docs/sending-requests/visualizer/#rendering-html

9. Share Collections

You can share your work with others by sharing

directly to emails
Run in Postman
Via JSON link

share collection

The Run in Postman button is a way to share a Postman Collection (and optional environment) with your users. Live Run in Postman buttons automatically stay updated with changes to your collection, providing consumers with its most recent version. You can also attach an environment to your live button to help onboard new users to your API quickly and efficiently.

10. Flows

You can use Flows to chain requests, handle data and create real-world workflows right in your Postman workspace. Flows help you create API workflows by connecting a series of requests through a drag-and-drop UI.

Flows in Postman

You can visit Postman Learning Center for more detailed information.

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