Postman Tutorial for Beginners: Sending Your First API Request

Welcome to Part 1 of the Postman Beginner Series!

Learn the basics of using Postman to send your first API request. Whether you’re new to APIs or exploring Postman for the first time, this step-by-step tutorial is perfect for you. Postman is widely known as an HTTP client – a handy way to send a request and receive a response. If you haven’t already done this, go ahead and try it out. Hit your favorite endpoint and inspect your response. Play around with different HTTP verbs, headers, and auth types.🎓

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Video:
1. How to use the Google Maps Geocoding API to convert addresses into geographic coordinates.
2. Setting up your API key through the Google Developer Portal.
3. How to organize sensitive data using Postman environment variables.
4. Building and sending your first API request with Postman.
5. Inspecting API responses and testing results.

💡 Pro Tips:
Replace hard-coded values with environment variables for better security and flexibility.
Learn how to handle parameters in Postman for clearer and more efficient API requests.

✅ Make sure you’re using the Postman standalone app (not the deprecated Chrome app).

📌 Next Steps: Continue your API learning journey with Part 2 of this series, where we’ll explore response parsing, testing, and chaining requests!

📚 Chapters:
0:00 – Intro to the Postman Beginner Series
0:10 – What is Postman & the Geocoding API Example
0:59 – Getting an API Key from Google
1:21 – Setting Up Your Postman App
1:40 – Sending a GET Request & Using Params
2:07 – Creating & Using Environment Variables
3:04 – Sending the Request & Viewing the Response

💬 Have questions or feedback? Drop a comment below, and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more Postman tutorials! 👍

[GnurpsYrag]

Almost at the beginning, Ms. Lin makes us delve into a complex Google API. She offers no explanation about how to get to the web page that has the URL we are to test. This seems typical thus far for Postman. They are so far beyond beginners that they don't know how much we don't know. This video is part of a "New to Postman" series, but it is not beginner stuff.

[debrashannon]

The "2 minutes" it was supposed to take to get an API key took me all evening and even now I'm not sure if my credit card is going to be billed and, if so, how much I will be charged by Google for using their API to follow along with this tutorial.
There's something about being able to set a quota but that is only available if you have a "billable API". Gee, doesn't the fact that Google required a credit card and forced me to agree to their billable terms and conditions mean that I have a "billable API"? This is one heck of a hurdle to have to jump through to take this tutorial.

Could you please produce a tutorial that does NOT use a billable API? And, it would be helpful to provide a nice long explanation of how one is supposed to get whatever API key is required. Better yet, if Postman doesn't require an API key, why make us go through this to take the tutorial?

[guyboswell]

Is there a part 0? Or even a part -1?

[vivekrk]

I'm not able to find params option in postman

[emmalilliestam]

In order to get an API key I will need to give them my billing address... is there any other way of going through an equivalent tutorial?

[jonwilliam]

FAIL IN THIS TUTORIAL....THEY FORGOT TO MENTION THIS


After creating the API KEY, you need to enable the Google Map Place API in the API&Service board.
Also, google will want to bill you to change the address from google hq.

[rikkimistry]

Hi, I'm getting "The provided API key is invalid". I've attempted multiple keys (regenerated them multiple times), I even tried not using the variable and hard-coding the key and I still get the same error message.

[mogliff]

I can create auth token dynamically but problem is that I have updated this token every time I run it from Jenkins any help

[netgeek]

I didn't know about environment secrets ... nice tutorial

[shuxiwei]

After creating the API KEY, you need to enable the Google Map Place API in the API&Service board.

[laurahelen]

"error_message": "This API project is not authorized to use this API." :(

[ravicku]

Please turn off "SSL certification Verification" if you get "Could not get any response" error

[awwwswish]

Worked like a charm! I created a brand new gmail account and setting up billing was not required as suggested in other comments.

[mrcostas]

Waste of time. we cannot continue since we must enter our visa card in google in order to enable API, and maybe future charges will be there

[balajikoc]

Why is tutor so hurry, bad tutorial.. is it for beginners?

[Mackeykevin]

Awful tutorial. Why do you have to use a billable API key for the purpose of teaching ?

[FerreshopGabeGabrielBrusich]

necesito una version en español Gracias

[glizzyy]

Yea those first 2 minutes wouldve been great if you showed us how...video was pretty bad.