Introducing Postman’s new and improved system proxy

Akshay Deo

September 15, 2023

Since its inception, Postman has been built to be a valuable Swiss Army Knife tool for all API developers. An essential facet of API development involves reverse engineering or inspecting APIs. We already have a Postman Interceptor browser extension tool that helps developers intercept any browser traffic and bring it into Postman. Today, we are excited to announce a wholly revamped system-level proxy built into Postman. It supports HTTP/HTTPS traffic capture and allows users to generate collections from intercepted traffic. In this blog post, we’ll walk you all through all these features.

First, we will use the Postman proxy to intercept traffic from the Spotify desktop application and generate a collection of intercepted requests. Start the proxy session by clicking Start Proxy in the bottom panel:

If you start a proxy session for the first time, the Postman app will ask you to install Root CA when you click the Start Proxy Session button. This will help the proxy server to intercept HTTPS traffic:

The proxy session will start once you update settings by inputting your password. You will see your system traffic getting captured in the ongoing session.

Since we want to focus on the spotify.com domain in this example, let’s add a filter on the session level. This will capture requests with the spotify.com domain. Now, let’s return to the Spotify app and fetch a playlist:

Let’s stop the session. The app will ask you to name the session; let’s name it “Spotify Session.” Select the requests we want to play with and click Save Requests:

Pro Tip: You can generate a collection from the entire session as well. For the sake of this post, I am picking only a few requests.

Then, let’s name the collection “Spotify Session” and ask to organize requests based on the endpoints:

Your collection is ready to test, evaluate, and document the captured APIs. It’s this simple to convert captured traffic into a sharable, documentable, testable, and publishable collection.

With all these changes and improvements, Postman’s proxy has 100% feature parity with all the available HTTP/S proxy products in the market. Give it a try, and let us know your feedback in a comment below.

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