Why Insomnia and not Postman?

Well, answer is straightforward – apples vs oranges. Somewhat I prefer Insomnia, though it is just a simplistic API client. But this is exactly what I normally need without additional features and Insomnia seems to be fulfilling my daily needs.

• Depending on against what environment you run your API calls you can define a variables and their values per environment e.g. lab/prod. (Left top corner). Templating relies on Nunjucks

variable values for Dev environment

• Allows to refer to results of different API calls e.g. Authorization Bearer token value – in the example below Fetch users requires Bearer token to be included in GET request hence it needs to perform first Authorization, obtain token and insert it into GET request:

Authorize URL looks as follows (IMPORTANT: never embed usernames, passwords in config files – rely on solutions like Hashicorp’s Vault, Azure KeyVault etc):

By peeking at results of the POST (Timeline) response from the server includes authorization Header that includes token value.

Subsequent Method can use the value just by manually copy pasting value of the header into authorization header of GET request:

Smarter solution is to define header in Header tab and use a function that will call POST Authorize method, grab the resulting authorization header value (Bearer token) and insert it into a header in the GET request. In value type CTRL+Space and look for function Response – Header:

Double click on red field and Edit tag window will pop up:

Now your requests will be using appropriate value for authorization header.

IMPORTANT: in order to have Edit tag pop up available you cannot enable (leave unticked) Raw template syntax as otherwise you’ll have manually craft in Nunjucks value of the header.