[Piisamirotta]

Lately Postman suddenly required creating an account to their cloud, to use my five different rest requests from scratchpad. I got annoyed so bad that deleted that piece of cr*p immediately. Never looking back.

Then I found Bruno and fell in love. Thanks for the great work!

[tmm84]

For me, I had a project full of test cases in Postman and one day I was connected to the internet it phoned home to update. After the update it said I needed an account (okay, use work email no big deal) after logging in it said all my test cases and collections were gone. From there it was shell scripts with curl for me.

[Wicher]

You may be able to replace some of your curl+shell with Hurl — https://hurl.dev/#also-an-http-test-tool .

[fao_]

Why should someone bother to do this, if they already know and have a handle on cURL's syntax?

[jicea]

Compared to curl, you can:

- chain requests passing data from a request to another,

- add tests on every responses: body, headers, certificates, etc... You can use JSONPath or XPath for example,

- there is some sugar syntax to construct request bodies (GraphQL body is annoying with curl, JSON etc...),

- there is some sugar syntax for retrying requests on asserts, delaying requests etc..

Under the hood, Hurl uses libcurl so a lot of curl's options are exposed through Hurl (and we benefit of a lot of curl features like HTTP/3, IPV4/IPV6 etc... and speed and reliability of course!).

(I'm one of the maintainers)

[Wicher]

From the first three lines of the linked-to paragraph:

> Hurl can run HTTP requests but can also be used to test HTTP responses. > Different types of queries and predicates are supported, from XPath and JSONPath on body response, to assert on status code and response headers.

[tdudhhu]

Insomnia did the same. There was an option to migrate to an offline account but the migration did not work.

So I turned to Bruno. I have been happy with it but there are some strange issues. Sometimes it does not save settings when I press Ctrl s. I still don't know when this happens but I lost some work a couple of times because of this.

[noisy_boy]

I am using Insomnia but haven't been prompted for account setup etc (switched to it from Postman after the cloud nonsense).

I hope Bruno has support for separate environments and environment-level variables soon because the ability to set global variables along with environment-specific variables/overrides makes the setup much more manageable (I think there is a feature request already open for this).

PS: if this possible via some sort of external JSON/script, I am more than happy to set that up. I am just not familiar enough with Bruno tips/tricks :(

[JacobiX]

Same here regarding Insomnia: all my requests have disappeared. I was searching for an alternative, and this is a godsend :) somehow I missed it when searching for alternatives.

[kipple]

I've noticed this same save issue in Bruno

The fix for me: cmd+s only works if the left pane (Query, Body, etc) has focus

Save does not work if the right pane (Response, Headers, etc) has focus

[fifilura]

We used Postman but it got forbidden in our org for that reason, so no more.

Can't say I really miss it. I personally prefer just using a jupyter notebook for these kinds of tasks. With a custom tool like this it becomes a dead end with the data. Maybe you want to decode it if it is on a binary format. Or you want to plot some basic stats?

[JeremyNT]

This has always been my approach really. Use curl for basic stuff, use a full featured repl for deeper exploration. I use Ruby but same idea.

I never quite saw enough value in tools like postman. Usually either what you are doing is trivial enough for vanilla curl or complex enough to warrant reaching for a general purpose programming language.

[ambigious7777]

I can relate to this. I've tried to use Postman and Insomnia in the past, but the UI is pretty complicated with a lot of domain specific terms.

Instead, I just hacked together a small Python library, called all the APIs from there, and pushed to Git. Everyone on my team understands it, I have 100% control, and no cloud needed.

[antonvs]

It's for people who can't or don't want to code. It's used pretty heavily by testing teams.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> With a custom tool like this it becomes a dead end with the data.

Not sure if you're referring to Postman or Bruno. The biggest purported benefit of Bruno over Postman is that it saves API request collection files in simple, human-readable text files that are designed to be committed to a source control repo and easily shared, in a way that's not particularly tied to the Bruno app.

The demo video explains in detail: https://youtu.be/b_ctmKlEOXg

[fifilura]

I think it was pretty obvious I was referring to Postman.

I don't have time to look at a 15 minute marketing ("BILLION dollar") video. Is it available in text form?

Does Bruno decode e.g. AVRO or protobuf? Connect to a schema server?

What is considered "human readable"? A JSON file like postman?

Could you elaborate what is the benefit of using this tool compared to a REPL/notebook?

Are you affiliated with Bruno?

[hn_throwaway_99]

You are putting up all these hypotheticals as if all the info isn't easily available on Bruno's site, and then declare "I don't have time to watch a 15 minute video". Hint, youtube 2x and transcripts are your friend.

I didn't know about Bruno until I saw this post on HN.

[fifilura]

I dont know how to answer this rant. Other than that you missed a chance to convince me.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Why don't you just rtfm? I'm not interested in "convincing" you, you're free to proudly declare that you refuse to read the docs, and you have an odd definition of "rant".

[throwaway56391]

I've always preferred Insomnia over Postman. The interface fits me better. But now they also started requiring cloud login, so maybe I'll give Bruno a try if it degrades further

[giovani]

Insomnia has an open source fork from before all the cloud bulls*t: https://github.com/ArchGPT/insomnium

[360MustangScope]

But then you have to deal with this annoying “feature” of it deleting your data when it feels like it. Can’t tell you how much work I’ve lost to this bug.

I’ve just switched to using hurl. Can’t be bothered with any of this nonsense with all these GUI programs

[yard2010]

Imagine this cloud enshitification reaches everything else. You need a cloud account to curl or wget, use ffmpeg or simply sed lol

[ParetoOptimal]

Emacs, org-mode, and restclient-mode will be there :)

[rrr_oh_man]

How to get into emacs? Where would you recommend to start for an absolute dunce?

[firewolf34]

restclient-mode?? another awesome mode I have to check out, I swear there's a mode for everything!

[cedws]

Crunch of capitalism. Anything that provides value can be turned into something that generates money. Not many people will walk away from money out of the goodness of their heart.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Anything that provides value can be turned into something that generates money.

I don't have much of a problem with that. Heck, looks like Bruno has multiple tiers that they sell the product for, and it looks like a very reasonable way to make money.

The problem is this idea of "infinite growth" that modern markets demand, which results in the eventual enshittification of nearly all tech products these days. Postman could have had a very nice, reasonable business, but once they took an obscene amount of funding (nearly half a BILLION dollars, for an API client tool!!!) their fate was sealed. Beyond taking too much money, Postman clearly thought they had a much bigger moat than they actually do.

[gquiniou]

Postman is basically unusable in a lot of large companies now as it's often forbidden to save credentials on external cloud.

[rahhulk7]

For internal APIs, check out Aspen's private-by-default approach & AI powered testing to streamline your workflow. No cloud storage & built-in JSON editing.

[groone]

I moved to k6 - a tool meant for load tests but flexible and great for any kind of API tests. Great for any kind of scenarios as the tests are in javascript

[nirav72]

Postman has become bloated as well. Takes a lot longer to open up these days. Even on a new machine.