postmanlabs/postman-app-support

This repository holds the early source and support materials for Postman, an API testing tool that began as a Chrome browser extension. Postman was built to solve a practical problem: one of its creators needed to test an HTTP API and could not find a tool that felt right, so they built their own. The project started by adding two things that were missing elsewhere: a history of sent requests and the ability to organize requests into named collections. The tool lets you compose HTTP requests by filling in a URL, choosing a method (GET, POST, and so on), and adding headers or body data. Responses come back formatted for readability: JSON and XML are pretty-printed rather than shown as raw text. You can also preview image responses directly in the interface. For authentication, early versions supported Basic Auth and OAuth 1.0 helpers. A key feature is environments, which let you define a set of variables (like a base URL or API key) and swap between them. This makes it easy to point the same saved requests at a local development server, a staging server, or a production server without rewriting anything. Collections keep related requests grouped together and can include documentation written in HTML. This README covers the Chrome packaged app era of Postman, before it became a standalone desktop application. The build process described here uses Node and Grunt, and installation involved loading the extension manually in Chrome's developer mode. The repository appears to have served as an issue tracker and early codebase home rather than as the primary home of the current Postman product. If you want the current Postman platform, the README points to getpostman.com.