9 ms·
Show HN: Posting v1 – The modern HTTP client that lives in your terminal
Hi HN!
I just released version 1.0 of Posting, an open source terminal application I've been working on which you might find useful if you work with, test, or develop HTTP APIs!
Posting (https://github.com/darrenburns/posting https://github.com/darrenburns/posting) is an HTTP client, not unlike Postman and Insomnia. However, as a TUI application, it works over SSH and enables efficient keyboard-centric workflows. Your requests are stored locally in simple readable YAML files, meaning they're easy to read and version control.
Some other features include:
- "Jump mode" navigation
- Environments/variables with autocompletion
- Syntax highlighting powered by tree-sitter
- Vim keys support in much of the UI
- Various builtin themes
- A config system
- "Open in $EDITOR"
- A fuzzy search command palette for quickly accessing functionality.
Posting is written in Python using the Textual[1] framework, which I also help maintain.
Although 1.0 has been released, it's not yet feature complete. I'd love to hear feedback from the community to make sure I'm on the right track and learn what's important to people.
So, if you have any thoughts, feature requests, or opinions, big or small, I'd love to hear them. At this early stage, your ideas can really help shape the roadmap of the project!
Thanks,
Darren
[1] Textual: https://github.com/Textualize/textual https://github.com/Textualize/textual
- tusharsadhwani 2y agoThis is already the best API testing client that I have found. It's lightweight, it's snappy, it's intuitive, and it can run on a VPS out of the box over an SSH connection, no proxying needed.
- nsdarren 2y agoThank you very much! It's definitely not feature complete yet - but I hope it can be a solid competitor in the space.
- zorrn 2y agoDoes anyone know which terminal emulator is used in all the examples? Looks very good!
- dlvhdr 2y agoThis is amazing
- connordavenport 2y agoThis is fantastic, I love the jump mode navigation. Will be using this for the foreseeable future. Thanks for making it.
- astrodude 2y agoThis looks great. I love that it's using YAML files that can be version controlled and shared. I developed Just-API (https://github.com/kiranz/just-api https://github.com/kiranz/just-api) with YAMLs for automation testing of APIs.
- yoavm 2y agothis looks really great! since insomnia started requiring an account I never really settled on anything else. the one thing that worries me is compatibility - I echo the voices asking for hurl support. it kinda sucks that each of these programs invents its own format. it would also be great to be able to run these requests as part of a CI pipeline, without opening the TUI. supporting a format like hurl would add this ability automatically, because the same files could be used by other clients. p.s. upon trying it out the first things i missed is "how do I create a new collection?" and "how do I exit?". it felt that both should have been a command in the command plate. in the end if created the collection manually as a folder and exited using Ctrl+C, but I'm still not sure if that was the intended way.
- timvdalen 2y agoI've switched to the built-in HTTP client in Jetbrains IDEs. The experience is a _little_ worse for one-off requests, but it's a lot nicer for things you do more often, and very easy to version control and include in a project.
- nsdarren 2y agoThanks for the feedback! It is actually intended that you create the collection yourself first, but I should perhaps make that clearer. Hiding how to quit the app was just another attempt to win over the Vim crowd! (Yes ctrl+c is the intended way, it’s in the docs now and I’ll add it to the app footer)
- halfmatthalfcat 2y agoGive Bruno a look
- goalonetwo 2y agoAm I the only one that hates what the internet became? All HTTP APIs that are all made to interact with JSON.
- bartvk 2y agoWell as soon as it gets interesting, JSON goes out of the window. No firmware engineer would send me JSON over HTTP, for example.
- joseangel_sc 2y agowhat would you suggest?
- rochak 2y agoEverything looks great except for it being written in Python. I’ll work on developing something similar with Go.
- timetraveller26 2y agoYou dropped an /s I hope
- sibeliuss 2y agoThis thing is cool. How did you do the visual terminal layout?
- billowycoat 2y agoThat would be Textual https://textual.textualize.io/ https://textual.textualize.io/
- sprobertson 2y agoThis is great, I could see myself using it daily. The only hindrance I've found so far is navigating large responses. Would be cool to have some way to collapse chunks of JSON (a la https://github.com/antonmedv/fx https://github.com/antonmedv/fx), or even just more vim key navigation, like G/gg, %, {/}, and search.
- tills13 2y agoWe've strayed so far from God
- eigenvalue 2y agoLooks cool. Would be really nice if you could automatically generate the yaml files from an openapi.json file like the kind that are automatically generated by FastAPI.
- nsdarren 2y agoThere's an experimental OpenAPI import function.
- leetrout 2y agoThis looks pretty cool! I have yet to find something to pull me away from the Rest Client extension for VS code. I will give this a try and see how it shakes out but at a glance on my phone I am not seeing support for variables. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...
- Iwan-Zotow 2y agoyeah, REST vscode client is golden, just for the integration part. Curious if it works in VSCODE terminal, did you try it?
- CodeWriter23 2y agoDoes it support OAuth2 authentication/ token acquisition? I’d love to not have to put my access token / secret key into Postman. Happy to be a tester.
- nsdarren 2y agoIt doesn't support OAuth2 yet, but I do plan to add more auth schemes in the future.
- CodeWriter23 2y agoI’ll keep my eye on your progress. Thanks.
- D13Fd 2y agoNice. Textual is awesome. I used it to develop a screenshot database app for an online game. It was ridiculously easy and the resulting app is speedy.
- nsdarren 2y agoThank you!
- waiyan13 2y agoKudos to you man. I also had the same idea of developing a similar TUI tool because I'm getting tired of Electron apps for this. Now I can use yours with a peace of mind. BTW, have you looked at Bruno before deciding to develop yourself?
- nsdarren 2y agoThank you! I had a look at the Bruno website for the first time a few weeks ago, although I haven't tried it for myself yet. I'm definitely inspired by and agree with a lot of the principles behind Bruno: local first, developer friendly, readable/Git-friendly collections and so on. I think I share a lot of the same motivations as Bruno's creator - I feel the landscape of HTTP API testing clients may actually have regressed in recent years from a developer's perspective, as the companies behind Postman/Insomnia etc. figure out how to monetise them.
- kbd 2y agoTextual trending to a new de-facto basis for cross-platform gui apps is a HUGE improvement from every new app being js and Electron! Not to mention replacing heavy Java gui apps as well! The myriad DB guis for whatever historical reason have mostly been slow heavy, and paid, Java apps. I'd actually written a thing that integrated cli db tools(eg [1]) with kitty[2] and visidata to show a query editor and then results underneath in a kitty split pane. Now I've been using Harlequin[3] in my terminal. So nice to have these apps be fast programs that live in a terminal tab instead of their own bloated poorly-keyboard-driven Electron apps. [1] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/main/HOME/.config/litecli/config https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/main/HOME/.config/litecli/... [2] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/main/HOME/bin/kw https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/main/HOME/bin/kw [3] https://github.com/tconbeer/harlequin/ https://github.com/tconbeer/harlequin/
- gregwebs 2y agoWould be great to be able to use it with the hurl format to have a GUI for hurl: https://hurl.dev/docs/hurl-file.html https://hurl.dev/docs/hurl-file.html
- nsdarren 2y agoI'm going to explore integration with other formats in the future. Right now there's experimental (incomplete) support for importing from OpenAPI v3. I'd like to add Postman and Insomnia collection importing too. Some kind of integration with Hurl could be very nice too, but would likely come further down the line.
- pesch3 2y agoPlease, allow using flat file http messages. IntelliJ has a great build in http client that's using HTTP message files and otherwise has a similar feature set. But having to launch intellij every time is a real PITA.
- dotancohen 2y agoI was going to post almost this exact comment. When I've got an Intellij IDE already open, it's the best tool for this job - and that's saying a lot as we've been developing HTTP clients for decades. But I often find myself banging out a curl command with too many -H clauses if nothing Jetbrains is already running. For those who haven't used the Jetbrains HTTP client recently: maybe two or three years ago it was completely replaced and has been improved continuously since. Give it a try.
- erksa 2y agoThis is great and feels very smooth to use. I really like the UX of it. Great including themes, but for light mode it's only one. Does Posting/Textual support no theming falling back on the configured terminal that runs it?
- nsdarren 2y agoYou'll be able to add custom themes pretty soon. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks. There's no fallback to the ANSI theme of the terminal as it breaks a lot of Textual's features. There is a PR open at the moment relating to detecting the terminal background colour I believe, so in the future we could probably use that to choose a reasonable fallback.
- erksa 2y agoGreat, appreciate it! Really like it, so will try it out in my toolkit for a while! Thanks for the great work you have been doing and sharing with the community.
- lylejantzi3rd 2y agoAm I the only one who prefers to use nodejs and fetch for this these days? Especially since I need it to work in Windows (and no, I can't install WSL).
- billowycoat 2y agoIf you prefer writing JavaScript, the more power you, but I suspect Posting works on Windows. Textual, the library Posting is built on top of certainly does.
- 4lejandrito 2y agoThen you may like https://github.com/4lejandrito/fetchbook https://github.com/4lejandrito/fetchbook
- lylejantzi3rd 2y agoWhy? It does less than what plain code can do, it's less flexible, and harder to understand. Seriously, what problem is this trying to solve?
- flufluflufluffy 2y agoI’m going to use this from now on simply because of how much more fun it is xD edit: omg I didn’t even notice the vim keybinds I’m sold
- saila 2y agoThis is awesome. Here are a couple bits of feedback: - It took me a while to find the Metadata tab to edit a request's name, I guess because I don't think of the name and description as metadata (even if in a technical sense they are, relative to the request config). My inclination would be to make this the first tab and rename it to Info. - I somehow managed to save two requests into the same file with no warning/confirmation from the UI. - When using the up/down arrows to navigate between requests in a collection, I found it counterintuitive to have to hit Enter to actually select the request.
- nsdarren 2y agoGreat feedback, thank you. I agree “Info” is probably clearer. There are a couple of UX sharp edges to clear up for sure - a bit more validation, confirmations, etc to be added.
- kbd 2y agoAfter never being happy with Postman or Insomnia and defaulting to 'curlie' for http requests, Posting is the first http gui that I'm actually sticking with. I have a terminal tab with it open all the time and it somehow manages to be more efficient than "up arrow+enter" (since you can just hit enter). Thanks for improving my workflow, Darren!
- nsdarren 2y agoThanks for your kind words!