Resource | Replace Postman with humble Bash

Replace Postman with humble Bash

By Team Abletech.nz, 11 September 2018, 2 min read

Cameron Fowler recommends you simplify your toolset by replacing Postman with Bash

Postman is a great API testing tool. It has a boat-load of functionality that I will never use, but at the heart of it, it does these things:

Calls an API in a reproducible way
Formats the response nicely
Handles passing variables into the API request and parsing variables out of the API response

I’m all in favour for up-skilling in tools I already have available on my machine, and simplifying my toolset. Often I find that some product I’ve been using for years is actually solving a problem that has already been solved by a developer in the form of a command line tool.

I figured that this is a fairly simple problem to solve using bash and curl and some JSON parsing (in my case, I used jq). It turns out it is simple and very powerful.

Simply set some environment variables in a file:

# file: ./caller/cameron
export HOST="my.test.example.com"
export USERNAME="cameron"
export password="..."

Then put other HTTP calls in other files, and source them from the command line. I would expect to call our ‘system’ like this:

. caller/cameron # which container the above environment variables
. get_bearer_token # which calls an API and gets a token, setting it as another environment variable
./get_test_endpoint # a simple authorised API call
./post_test_endpoint # an example of a post.

An example of how you might use the response to get out a BEARER token:

# file: ./get_bearer_token
curl --trace-ascii last_trace.curl \
  --include --silent --show-error \
  --header [@headers](http://twitter.com/headers) \
  --request POST \
  --url "$HOST/auth/token" \
  --data @- <<EOF > last_response.http
{
  "username": "$USERNAME",
  "password": "$PASSWORD",
  "clientId": "test-client",
  "grantType": "password",
  "remember": false
}
EOF

cat last_response.http
echo

BEARER_TOKEN="$(tail -n 1 last_response.http | jq -r '.accessToken')"
export BEARER_TOKEN
echo "$BEARER_TOKEN"

A GET:

file: ./get_test_endpoint (dont forget chmod +x)
curl --trace-ascii last_trace.curl \
  --include --silent --show-error \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER_TOKEN" \
  --request GET \
  --url "$HOST/test-endpoint" > last_response.http

A cut down POST example:

file: ./post_test_endpoint (dont forget chmod +x)

curl --trace-ascii last_trace.curl \
  --include --silent --show-error \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER_TOKEN" \
  --request POST \
  --url "$HOST/test-create-endpoint" \
  --data @- <<EOF > last_response.http
{
  "mode": "test",
  "payload": null,
  "testdata": 0,
  "easyJSON": true
}
EOF