Curl: You Already Have A Tool For Testing REST APIs

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There are so many tools out there for testing a REST API but did you know that on your Linux system you already have a perfectly good tool to do this, you don't need postman or anything like that because you already have curl installed which is going to handle all of the http methods that you need.

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[zigbaligb]

Thanks for this very good video I just recently started working with web API’s and using postman (as advised by coworkers) seemed a little overkill and more complex than working with a cli tool such as curl for basic needs.

[uyohn]

How did you know! I installed postman just yesterday!!! Great vid as always.

[henninb]

Postman has an option to output curl commands such that folks can learn the curl commands easily. I used wget early on in my career, but now I live in curl. Great tool.

[sawekk.]

cURL was the only thing I could think of while I was looking at your beard ;)

[solvm]

Great vid! I like to use HTTPIE as my command line HTTP client.

[BamBalaam]

I'm also a big advocate of CLI tools to replace GUI ones, but I find that in this case it depends on the use-case. In a personal setting, absolutely, go for curl/httpie. In a work setting, I'll always advocate Postman or tools alike, because it's way easier to onboard people who are not as comfortable as you are with CLI tools and scripting languages.

A big quality of Postman is that you can export a whole collection of tests, which people can simply import and play around with immediately. The adaptation margin would be more complicated if you gave them a bash script with hundreds of calls to curl, where you have to find the correct one to edit for your experimenting.

[beron_the_colossus]

Yeah curl's manpage has 2531 lines, thanks for the informative video mate!

[bruderdasisteinschwerermangel]

I actually had a conversation about this earlier.
My mate, who is pretty Windows-centered, found it weird that his group in the group project decided to make a CLI frontend for a REST API, which wasn't interactive.

Meanwhile I sit in my group with a 100 line shell script that does a crap ton of cURL commands for testing the API...

[rafaafeitos]

Great tutorial, thank you for sharing

[aliarefjs]

great! can you do one video on how to use rest api on neovim, I would like to replace totally postman and use Neovim.

[tiberiusvetus]

Chrome network inspector allows you to right click -> copy as cURL.

[nick-ukraine]

This video has convinced me that I'm unlikely to use this tool. Thanks

[humm]

So … one sends a little bit of text (the request type, the headers, end endpoint, a bit of other data) to a server, but with the completely unneeded overhead of HTTP?! I very much dislike that.

[SuperMarkusparkus]

Burp repeater is much better than curl for crafting ad hoc or arbitrary requests. I wish there was an open source version that was equally good.

[aram]

tip: try to use ctrl+pgup pgdown to switch between tabs in your browser, it works in programs like vscode vim too

[tarekali]

What about graphql api querying and stuff like websocket testing? Postman and postwoman can do that; CURL can't.

[paxaeterna]

Why can't we use curl for complex requests? It looks like a pretty robust tool

[engageintellect]

Unrelated to the content but..

I recently noticed in bspwm that if I have multiple windows open and use my key binding to close them all quickly (hold down super + q till all windows close) Compton/picom-Tyrone will crash.

Can anyone reproduce this? It annoys the hell out of me and keeps me going back to i3 as i3 is less “touchy”

Again, this only happens when closing more than 2 windows at a time by holding down the close/quit bspc binding.

[uyohn]

I'm bash noob, but it seems to work pretty much ok