Simulate a back end with Postman’s mock service

bhawna

March 16, 2017

Throughout the development process, delays on the front end or back end can hold up dependent teams from completing their work efficiently.  Some API engineers already use Postman to work on endpoints without relying on a front-end UI to simulate API requests.

Now, Postman has developed a new mock service to enable teams to simulate a backend server.  Front-end developers can simulate each endpoint in a Postman Collection (and corresponding environment) to view the potential responses, without actually spinning up a back end.

Front-end, back-end and API teams can now work in parallel, freeing up developers who were previously delayed as a result of these dependencies. Let’s walk through this step by step.

Set up a Collection for mocking

In this example, we have a Collection testAPI with corresponding environment testAPIEnv.  Let’s set up a mock service to enable your front-end team to simulate each endpoint in testAPI and view the various responses.

Navigate to every request in the Collection testAPI that you would like to include in this simulation, and save responses with details about the response body, header or status codes that you would like to see returned by that endpoint. In this example, we will save 2 responses with status codes of 200 and 401 for this particular request.  Once you save the desired responses, the Collection is ready for mocking.

Retrieve information needed for mock creation

Let’s retrieve the collectionId of testAPI using the Postman Pro API. Get a list of all your Collections using the GET All Collections endpoint. Search for the name of your Collection and retrieve the uid from the results, which will be used as the collectionId in the next step.

You can also use the Postman app to retrieve the collectionId. Find the Collection in your app and hit View Docs. The collectionId is visible in the documentation url: https://documenter.getpostman.com/collection/view/{{collectionId}}

As an optional step, you can include an environment template as a part of your simulation by retrieving the environmentId of testAPIEnv using the Postman Pro API. Get a list of all your environments using the GET All Environments endpoint. Search for the name of your environment and retrieve the uid from the results, which will be used as the environmentId in the next step.

Create a mock using the Postman Pro API

Create a mock using the POST Create Mock endpoint with the collectionId and environmentId you retrieved previously.

Verify that the mock has been created using the GET All Mocks endpoint, and your Collection is now ready to be simulated.

Run the mock service

Mock your Collection using the following url: https://{{mockId}}.mock.pstmn.io/{{mockPath}}

• • • mockId is the id that you received upon creating the mock and can be retrieved using the GET All Mocks endpoint.
    • mockPath is the path of your request that you’d like to mock, for example api/response.

Add the request header(s):

• Mock requests require one mandatory header, x-api-key, which is your Postman Pro API key for authentication. Don’t have a Postman Pro API key? Create one here.
• Mock requests also accept another optional header, x-mock-response-code, which specifies which integer response code your returned response should match.  For example, 500 will return only a 500 response. If this header is not provided, the closest match of any response code will be returned.

And there we have it. We have walked through the entire process of mocking a Collection from start to finish. We hope that you find this feature useful in increasing the efficiency of your team collaboration. And as always please reach out to us if you have any comments or questions.

Update: Now you can set up a mock server from the Postman app with examples.