You're likely exploring this course if you're already familiar with Postman, but would like to get more out of it.
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Please note that this presentation and its content is meant to provide brief overviews on the included topics. If you desire more information or detail, then please reach out to your Postman account team or participate in discussions at community.postman.com.
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Now, let's explore some stories that might drive your needs from this course.
As an API platform, Postman offers you the ability to create, version, define, develop, generate server code, test, deploy, observe, manage/share, and analyze your APIs all in one place!
Every aspect of API development, from designing a schema to building out test suites and generating live documentation, can be completed start-to-finish without leaving the Postman app. Maintaining an increased level of quality and productivity has never been so easy!
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As an API platform, Postman can be used to develop an API throughout its entire lifecycle. Pictured below is a typical API development workflow. Workflows can be organized around collections which stand in as a proxy for the API, but the API is the organizing principle for the requests, test suites, mocks, examples, monitors, and collections that relate to it. In other words, Postman collections are executable API descriptions.
Being API-First means building out a high-quality API before writing application code. Our Fundamentals presentation includes more in-depth information about API-First development and the API lifecycle here. With the help of Postman, your workflow can be further segmented in the following way:
Because the API serves as the organizing principle for all other parts of development in an API-first workflow, it would be reasonable to start with the API Builder.
Within the API Builder, you can define, document, test, deploy, and monitor an API. You can also generate your collection directly from the API Builder.
It's also possible to develop an API specification modeled after a collection. In other words, it's possible to work in reverse to generate an API within Postman.
Note that this isn't a formal process or feature in Postman yet, but this collection, shared by Matt Ball, can help you walk through this reversed scenario of producing an API spec from an existing collection. This process originated from Kevin Swiber's tool, which you can use in your browser here.
If you'd like to see the API Builder in action, spend about 15 minutes with Arlemi in The Exploratory.
In this video, Arlemi explains how to create a new API and write/import a new specification.
You can download a running server based on your API specification and use it as a starting point for development of your business logic.
In her blog post, Joyce shares that "Organizations like BigCommerce and Intuit use Postman code generation for developer onboarding. This allows external developers as well as new team members to get up to speed more quickly."
By adding a mock server to your collection and adding examples to your requests, you can simulate the behavior of a real API.
Using a mock server is also a best practice for testing APIs in a faster, more efficient way, which we will dive into more deeply in the next learning path.
Postman automatically generates basic, private documentation for any collection you create. It includes details for each request in the collection, along with sample code in various client languages. Request details include the method, authorization type, URL, headers, request and response structures, and examples. The documentation also displays all key-value pairs for request parameters, headers, and bodies.
Got 5 minutes? Watch Joyce walk through Postman's API documenation in this video.
To learn more about documenting your API, check out our learning page here.
To publish documentation, it must be part of a collection. You can publish documentation for any collections that you created or have permission to edit.
Find more information about publishing documentation here.
Note that publishing documentation for an API is one of many ways to increase adoption of that API , which we cover in a separate learning path within this presentation.
You can create collections to use as test suites, integration tests, or contract tests for your API. These collections can be linked to a specific version of your API. To find more information about testing an API, please read our documention or jog your memory about Postman tests, in general, by reviewing this learning path from our Fundamentals presentation.
We'll cover how to test APIs faster and more efficiently in this upcoming learning path.
In the API Builder, under the Test tab of any API version, you'll find an option to integrate with an existing CI/CD Pipeline, as documented here. After you set up the integration, you can view the status of builds or kick off a new build, all from within Postman. With the help of Newman and the Postman API, you also have the option to run API tests created in Postman as part of your CI pipeline.
In the API Builder, under the Test tab of any API version, you'll find an option to deploy to an existing API Gateway in AWS, as documented here.
With Postman, you can monitor an API in several ways. Below, you'll see what a Monitor looks like in the Montiors tab found on the far left of the Postman app.
We'll cover how to use Monitors for faster testing in this upcoming learning path.
Postman Monitors can also be integrated into slack workspaces as documented here. You can find more in-depth information about integrations in an upcoming learning path within this presentation.
The Postman Enterprise Plan offers a Reports feature to producers and consumers of APIs who are using the platform and want to check on the overall performance of workspaces and teams within an organization. You can find this feature on the top left of your Enterprise home page.
What can the API Builder allow users to do?
When you feel you can answer the question above, challenge yourself with this collection from our 30 Days of Postman challenge for developers, which empowers users to build an API using a specification.
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Tests allow you to ensure that your API is working as expected, to establish that integrations between services are functioning reliably, and to verify that new developments haven't broken any existing functionality. With improved testing, you can rest assured you're producing high-quality APIs.
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As you might have guessed from exploring the other learning paths in this presentation, Postman supports the development of APIs through their entire lifecycle journies. There's no doubting, however, that many new Postman users arrive at the platform wanting to test APIs. Our previous Fundamentals course goes over the very basics of API testing in Postman. To build on those basics, check out how Valentin Despa uses GitHub's API to create repositories and issues through Postman in this 12-minute video. As Valentin does this, he shows off advanced testing skills like, using dynamic variables, inspecting error messages, and leveraging test scripts.
If you're familiar with chaining requests in Postman, then you know you can leverage the "order of operations" we talk about in our Fundamentals Debugging and Testing learning path to write pre-request and test scripts that run before and after an HTTP request (respectively). What if we told you that each request in this chain of requests within a collection could be set off, or run, with just one click? Well, this is exactly what we're talking about when we refer to the Collection Runner!
Postman Monitors can be collection-based. They can also be set up to monitor entire APIs (multiple collections). Monitors give you continuous visibility into the health and performance of your APIs. Once the monitor is running you’ll get alerted to any failures, so you can quickly identify and address issues before your API’s consumers are affected. Spend 5 minutes with Joyce to see how she sets up a monitor in the Postman cloud here. In her video, Joyce also shares the benefits of having an automated monitor set up with notifications.
You can practice creating monitors with this collection, which walks through several example monitoring scenarios.
The Postman API can be used to set up a webhook. With webhooks, you can trigger a collection at a specific time (similar to monitors) with your own custom payload, which can then be accessed in a collection. You can find more information about webhooks and how to set them up in our docs.
In this ~35-minute video clip, Trent and Joyce talk through how to use Newman and a CI/CD tool with Postman for testing. They show off how you can format a Newman shell command with flags to run in a similar way as the Collection Runner. The console outputs information that would indicate the health of your API.
Which Postman testing process(es) would allow you to run tests on a schedule?
When you feel you can answer the question above, practice the skills we covered in this learning path using the following challenges from our 30 Days of Postman challenge for developers:
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There are several benefits to increasing adoption of your API and one of the most powerful ways to do that is by creating a public workspace. Increasing adoption of your API can enable broader collaboration and help gather product feedback, as Joyce discusses in this blog post (4-minute read).
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One of the simplest ways to increase adoption of your API is to toggle the workspace in which that API exists in Postman from Team to Public - or - start with a public workspace for your API from the beginning.
In his blog post announcing public workspaces, Abhinav, Postman's CEO, compares the experience of using a public workspace to online gaming when he says, "In massively multiplayer games, a large community of gamers unites to play or join a quest. When the ability to play at a massively multiplayer level first appeared, it changed gaming forever. Similarly, Postman’s public workspaces will let a massive community of users engage with APIs or collections organized by API producers, with the ultimate quest of improving every API and the experience of that API’s consumers." If you'd like to read more about how public workspaces enable collaboration, you can read more from Abhinav here. For 5 easy steps to set up your first public workspace, you can also check out Joyce's blog post.
While making an API public allows it to be more accessible, refining documentation makes an API more usable. Check out this blog post from Joyce in which she reviews "shared similarities across good documentation". Be sure to also review the interactive version of the checklist she mentions in her blog post!
The following list of measures used to assess the health of a workspace are not all-encompassing, but generally thought to be a strong indicator of the overall success of your API/workspace's adoption:
For further reading about these metrics, please review Joyce's blog post.
Why is it important to refine your API's documentation if your objective is to increase adoption of your API?
When you feel you can answer the question above, follow Arlemi along in this ~50-minute Space Camp video, which highlights how you can optimize time to first call (TTFC) and marketing tactics to increase community engagement with your API among other topics.
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Integrations allow you to automate functionalities between Postman and other tools you might use in your workflow. Your existing software development pipeline tools can still be an asset to your team.
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Check out this blog post, written by Abhijit, which dives into some of the latest and greatest integrations Postman offers and why they support the Postman vision to streamline API workflows.
In this ~35-minute video, Shashank Awasthi, one of our very own product managers, shares that Postman provides a rich set of first-party integrations that allow you to extend use cases beyond Postman.
Our learning center documentation walks through the details of how to locate integrations in a given workspace. "Integrations" are made easily accessible via your workspace home page.
From "Integrations", you can then select "Browse All Integrations" and add integrations there. Each integration's page explains how to use the integration and what it could do. If available, you can select View or View All to view previously configured integrations for the selected integration.
It's also possible to add integrations throughout your workflow, beyond the home page of your workspace.
For example, within your workspace, you'll find options like the following Sync API integration found when defining API versions in Postman.
You may have seen webhooks mentioned in a previous learning path within this presentation, but some of the integrations available in Postman that use webhooks allow capabilities to back up collections, send team and collection activity feeds, and send monitor run results. Slack offers one such integration. Through the Slack integration, you can send monitor run results and team activity feeds to a slack channel.
You can find more information regarding custom webhooks in our documenation here.
Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to regularly merge code updates into a shared repository. It involves the process of automating the build and testing of code every time a developer commits code updates, as documented here. Jenkins is an example of a CI tool, which many developers use and you may have seen in a previous learning path within this presentation.
In her blog post, Joyce walks through every step you can take to practice using a Travis CI integration in a Postman sandbox environment.
We've only just scratched the surface here with integrations available to Postman users! If you'd like to see a full list of the integrations available, check out our documentation here (see the left side navigation bar for the list).
Which Postman integration would you use for Amazon S3 backups?
When you feel you can answer the question above, practice using custom webhooks with this challenge from our 30 Days of Postman Challenge for Developers.
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If you've progressed through each of the learning paths, congratulations! You've explored...
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