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Cover image for No Need Postman, Your VSCode is Enough for Testing Your API 😎⚑
Dzun N
Dzun N

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No Need Postman, Your VSCode is Enough for Testing Your API 😎⚑

hey you allπŸ‘‹

A couple week ago I've found Lightweight ⚑ and simple πŸ˜‹ tools for testing my API. That's Thunder Client.

Thunder Client

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Thunder Client is Rest API Client Extension for Visual Studio Code, with simple and clean design. The extension makes api testing very easy with Scriptless GUI based testing. and created by Ranga Vadhineni.

Thunder Client has many Main Features such as :

  • List item
  • Lightweight API Client
  • Simple & Clean UI
  • Collection & Environment Variables
  • Scriptless Testing

πŸ’» How to install it ?

  • It'a easy, just go to Extension menu in sidebar VSCode, and install it:
    image

  • And you'll see the thunder client icon in sidebar
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Let's try test Thunder Client

  • For testing API, I use a dummy api that's SWAPI(The Star Wars API).

https://swapi.dev/

  • Get request

    image

  • Set Environment

    image

Now you can try more by your self πŸ™ŒπŸ™Œ, have nice try.

Conclusion

Thunder Client is Rest API Client Extension for Visual Studio Code, with simple and clean design. The extension makes api testing very easy with Scriptless GUI based testing. and created by Ranga Vadhineni.

NB: It does'nt means Thunder Client is better then postman, not. Postman still has more feature than Thunder client. Thunder Client made for own use and simple API testing

Top comments (14)

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pzelnip profile image
Adam Parkin

Thunder Client does look cool, but just an FYI: it is not open source (which is of course also true of Postman). This matters around API testing tools as if (for example) you're hitting API endpoints which require auth, then any credentials you supply will go through that tool, so you have to trust that the authors/maintainers of that tool don't do anything questionable with those credentials. If the source is open, then you have the ability to examine the code to help alleviate this concern.

A similar extension is REST Client: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items... which is open source (github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient).

Note that I'm not saying that Thunder Client is bad, or that REST Client is better, just that for my use cases REST Client is more aligned with my values (I personally don't use VS Code extensions unless they are open source), so sharing for others who would like similar options.

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samuelmunoz profile image
Samuel Munoz

It has its flaws. When you use a Basic or Bearer token for authentication and change tabs, the token suddenly disappears. I'm sticking with Insomnia.

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ranga_vadhineni profile image
Ranga Vadhineni

Hi Samuel, I am creator of Thunder Client. In Auth what ever tab is active it will take values from that tab, so if you want basic auth set the values leave that as active.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

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mniak profile image
Andre Soares

If I may suggest, we should be able to save the requests as files and then each workspace could have its own set of collections

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ranga_vadhineni profile image
Ranga Vadhineni

Hi Andre, the request is saved in json files. And you can also save collections per workspace, see Team Features on our GitHub page.

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dzun_n profile image
Dzun N

it seem has bug. you may give feedback and report it.

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janejeon profile image
Jane Jeon

This looks BASICALLY the same as Insomnia (down to the UI), just in VSC?

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dzun_n profile image
Dzun N

I think so, in daily I use insomnia, now it has more clean UI

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daveappz profile image
David

This is really cool, I used insomnia for a while now. This will make it one less step to take to quickly check a response during building or t-shooting. One feature that would be super sweet though is to have the ability to right click in an api sdk and make new request with it. Also swagger scraping would be pretty sweet too.

Anyways, thanks for the tip.

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cadams profile image
Chad Adams

This is awesome. I’ll have to try it out. πŸ™‚

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dzun_n profile image
Dzun N

have nice trying

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rhmankml profile image
Miftah Rahman

Nice post dude

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dzun_n profile image
Dzun N

thanks

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klukiyan profile image
Kiril Lukiyan

Nice, but doesn't have postman's "export code" (php-curl for example)