Technical Articles
Bye bye Postman – Welcome Insomnia
The sign-in feature at the top of the Postman window always annoyed me. Today, I received an email suggesting that we might want to consider Postman alternatives, which led me to install Insomnia by Kong.
Exporting and importing a Postman file worked seamlessly, and sending a request was of course not an issue. One thing I noticed was the absence of the Tests tab. This feature could be useful if I wanted to store a response as a variable and use it in another request, especially if I wanted to store the token of the result of an OAuth request. However, to be fair, I have only used this feature one or two times in the past and was too lazy to figure out how to store the value. As long as a bearer token doesn’t expire every hour, I’m fine with copying and pasting the token once in a while.
I searched (asked ChatGPT) for a solution within Insomnia and found Chaining Requests.
This is very nice. Pressing Ctrl + Space in the token field shows you the possibility to get the value of a Response – Body Attribute.
Insomnia select box to select Response – Body Attribute
…and then select the OAuth request and use the access token as JSONPath: $.access_token. I’ve also defined the trigger behavior to get a new token after 24 hours.
Input dialog to select the OAuth request and access token.
I will use Insomnia more often and definitely take advantage of the possibility to use the OAuth token in this easy and more or less intuitive way. I just need to remember Ctrl + Space (a right click also works) and the JSONPath $.access_token, and then I’m good to go and say bye bye Postman – it was a nice time.
In Insomnia, there's a plugin called "Save variables" that will allow one to save variable after the call is executed, thus saving time to refer to the variable on the subsequent call.
Chaining works fine, but everytime you have to specify, where in Postman, we can save the variable as soon as it is available, and refer to it on subsequent call.
Using this "Save variable" plugin, one can do the same > Save the variable as soon as it's available and refer to it without doing the lengthy chaining process.
I noticed that Insomnia supports plugins. At first, I didn’t check out this feature. But, after taking a closer look, it seems like something worth exploring. The ‘Save Variables’ plugin seems promising and is something I will keep in my mind. Thank you!