A few years ago, I switched from Postman to Insomnia. Postman had become bloated with buttons and features I didn't need. Insomnia felt lightweig

My favorite Insomnia features and shortcuts

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Style Pass

2024-04-30 16:30:02

A few years ago, I switched from Postman to Insomnia. Postman had become bloated with buttons and features I didn't need. Insomnia felt lightweight in comparison. It had stayed focused on simple features that I often take advantage of.

Insomnia was invaluable for testing and iterating when we were planning the design of our public REST API for Stashpad. Switching to a different request is much faster, and even though our initial API offering is quite simple some of my favorite features still came in handy.

I have found that setting up my environments correctly helps me quickly switch between testing against localhost and production. Any time I start a new collection of requests, I start by setting up the baseUrl I'll be querying against across multiple environments. First, I set up a Local environment for testing against localhost.

Once I select the Local environment, all of the data in that environment is available to use in any input field in the app. Template data can be referenced by wrapping the variable name in double curly brackets, like {{baseUrl}}. There's even an autocomplete, which is helpful if you don't remember the exact casing you used when defining the variable.