Bring your APIs into Postman faster than ever

Akshay Deo

March 21, 2023

Postman is the industry’s de facto API development platform, used by more than 25 million developers worldwide. However, we understand that, at present, your APIs or API blueprints are spread across multiple tools (VCS, gateways, etc.) and in multiple formats (OpenAPI, WSDL, Proto, etc.). Therefore, we are on a mission to build a ubiquitous API platform that will simplify the representation and storage of sources of truth for your APIs. This year, we’re focused on making the Postman API Platform more robust, omnipresent, and straightforward to onboard—read more about it here.

Taking steps towards this initiative, I am excited to announce some key improvements we’ve made for import workflow in the Postman app for both desktop and web.

Why?

Before going into actual features, let me talk about our overall thought process behind the features and improvements we are shipping today and will ship in the future. Import is one of the most frequently used features by our developer community. Almost a million elements are imported weekly on the Postman API Platform through this feature. But over time, as we added support for more and more formats, import flow became a multistep workflow, which was not the intention. We believe that import needs to be as frictionless as possible.

Keeping this as a goal, we have added the following improvements to precede many more that we will ship over the next few months.

Let’s begin as a developer; there are many points in the API development lifecycle where I must bring existing API information into Postman. It can be for writing test cases or learning and integrating third-party APIs in my application. With our March 2023 release, we have added three improvements to achieve this seamlessly.

1. Go from cURL to request faster

cURLs are challenging to interact with, so I, as a developer, mostly bring them to Postman and continue my development workflow. From now on, Postman allows pasting cURL directly into the address bar to convert or import as a collection request.

2. Import collection using Collection JSON in a single click

This new design brings the most commonly used features to the front. For example, once you drag and drop a file/folder or paste the content to import in the text area, you will be redirected to the created collection/request or API without any interaction/confirmation. Along with these UI changes, we are also releasing some speed improvements to the import workflow.

3. Simplified drag-and-drop file and folder to import

Postman is a platform built by and for developers. Therefore, we actively listen to all of your feedback on GitHub. As an assessment of that commitment, we have resolved almost 30 GitHub issues related to Importers, Codegen, Proxy, and interceptors in the last month. If you have any feedback, please create a request or schedule a call with me here.

What’s next?

We are committed to improving importing any API information from outside to Postman, and this is just the beginning of it. In the April 2023 release, we will add more seamless import flows across the app, more bug fixes from GitHub reports, and some exciting language support for Codegen. Stay tuned.

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