Testing APIs with Postman

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>> Scott Moss: OK, now let's test our route. So, like I showed you earlier, I'm using something called Postman. You can download Postman just by googling Postman and downloading it and actually kind of just wanna show you. That part right quick because it was kind of tricky because they were like trying to get me to sign up and then they were like they had this one option I was like, whoa.

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That part right quick because it was kind of tricky because they were like trying to get me to sign up and then they were like they had this one option I was like, whoa. Actually, you can kind of. Like cause if you click, I think if you click to sign it for free. Don't do that.

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Don't do that. Click the download button instead. Click the one for your platform, cause it's like, oh yeah, that's orange and it sticks out and it's free all the things. No, click the gray button out here that they don't want you to see.

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No, click the gray button out here that they don't want you to see. So find your platform, do that. This is literally making an account and doing all the stuff and there's like a trial and. The only paid features as of today that Postman has is for teams.

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The only paid features as of today that Postman has is for teams. We're not working on a team right now. You don't need any of those features, you're just testing out APIs. If you have your own tool to test APIs, use that.

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If you have your own tool to test APIs, use that. I prefer to use tools in the terminal actually. There's also tools built in a VS Code that will let you test APIs, but Yeah, Postman, it's been here for a while, it's not going anywhere, so yeah, use Postman. There's other ones too.

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There's other ones too. There's another one called Insomnia. Which I think is better than Postman, but I think they charge you now. Oh wait, no, they, OK.

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Oh wait, no, they, OK. Yeah, I guess they saw that subreddit people complaining and they went back. They were charging people now they have a free one. I actually think this is better than Postman in my opinion, but they both do the same thing.

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I actually think this is better than Postman in my opinion, but they both do the same thing. It just allows you to like test your API. So it's a visual thing for API so. Regardless of what you're using, I'm in Postman, so now I'm gonna test my API, and it's gonna be localhost What's Also, the long way of saying that is 121.

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Regardless of what you're using, I'm in Postman, so now I'm gonna test my API, and it's gonna be localhost What's Also, the long way of saying that is 121. 127.0.0.1. That's also localhost for most people's computer, but you can just type in localhost. And then colon port 3000, right?

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And then colon port 3000, right? Every website has this colon 8080 on it, but like I said, the browser drops it off, so make sure you got your port there and then for us. At least for me I put slash health. I did a GET request to slash health, so for me I'm Postman I'm changing this verb to GET.

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I did a GET request to slash health, so for me I'm Postman I'm changing this verb to GET. And I'm making sure I put slash help. OK, I'm gonna hit send. And then I'm gonna get back my JSON message here.

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And then I'm gonna get back my JSON message here. Any observations around servers. Anybody come in thinking that making an API was gonna be tougher than what I just showed? Because honestly, it's literally.

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Because honestly, it's literally. This is it. Everything else is just like supporting this. This is like an API.

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This is like an API. It's like done. Cool, so I mean. Play around, try some different things.

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Play around, try some different things. You can send other things back here. It literally doesn't matter like what you send here, right? It'll.

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It'll. I'll go. It'll go here, right? We can also send back other things, not JSON, so for instance, you can do a do send, and this thing has like these helper methods on it like send the file.

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We can also send back other things, not JSON, so for instance, you can do a do send, and this thing has like these helper methods on it like send the file. We're not gonna, we're not gonna do all that, but. OK, I literally said don't do that, so we can do that send and then. I don't know, see if I put a button in here.

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I don't know, see if I put a button in here. Well, it Actually, well, I don't know if Postman handles HTML. I guess that depends on Postman or if I need to declare HTML dock or not, but let's see what happens if I do this. Yeah, I just it sent it back as a as a string, so, oh, there it is, it does render HTML.

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Yeah, I just it sent it back as a as a string, so, oh, there it is, it does render HTML. So you see I sent back. HTML, right, so you, a server can send back anything, you know, it's not just JSON it. Whatever you want it to be, because it's it as long as it's parsable over the network threshold right?

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Whatever you want it to be, because it's it as long as it's parsable over the network threshold right? So the network barrier you can't send like logic Over the network or, you know, like you couldn't send like a function over the network. You could send a string that represented a function definition that might get ran. I don't know why you would want to do that, but you could, but you can't send anything executable over the network.

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I don't know why you would want to do that, but you could, but you can't send anything executable over the network. It can only be. You know, stuff that could be written to a file if that makes sense, Cool, and you can't send like recursive things by default either, so, or I'm sorry, cyclic things. So if you have like a like a date object is usually a big one, you can't typically send date objects over the wire without like.

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So if you have like a like a date object is usually a big one, you can't typically send date objects over the wire without like. Converting them to a string or something like that.