I Don't Need Postman Anymore!! I Use VS Code Instead...

i've been using postman to test out http requests for years now but i just found this extension in vs code that might replace it completely let's take a look all right so like i said i have used postman for years that's been my de facto tool for testing out rest api so as i build stuff i test it you've probably seen me use it in videos if you've seen other videos on the channel which by the way if you're new to the channel i'm james i do weekly videos on web development related topics all of that said i found uh this extension for vs code called thunder client and this is a rest api client for vs code it's lightweight postman alternative so what i'm hoping is this can fully replace postman for me because what i hate especially when recording videos is i get to a point where i design an api and then i have to open up a separate application to be able to test it out to see if it's working so if i can do all of that stuff right inside of vs code i think that's going to be a huge win uh so one i'm going to go ahead and upvote this thing i guess we maybe i should wait to see if i enjoy it i think i will though so we'll see so let's go into vs code and i'm inside of a project that i want to tell you about here in a second but while or before i do that let's install the thunder client so thunderclan is right here let's go ahead and install this thing and looks like it's good to go cool you see this little lightning bolt come up over here so what the source code is this is actually the source code for the compressed fm website so my friend amy dutton and i started this podcast called compressed fm and we just launched our first episodes here's the website i'll have a link below we just launched our first episodes uh to any to spotify to apple podcast anywhere you can find them so there's the compressed fm we've got the trailer and then four episodes are launched so go and check them out but what we're working on is a dashboard for sponsors to come in and see to statistics for the episodes that they sponsor so we're using simple cast and we're using the simple cast api and i was testing this out inside of the code so inside of simplecast you can see it makes a request to the api and it needs to pass in an authorization token so we're just going to test this thing out right inside of here so let's go into the thunder client uh let's see here under clients let's make a new request it's going to open up this tab that looks a lot like postman as you may expect we're going to send this request to the to this url so it's the api simplecast analytics and then we'll replace these variables with let's see instead of type i want this to be downloads and then the episodes uh we need to pass in a specific episode id and i can go and grab that in here if i click on one it's actually going to be in the slug up here so it's going to be this part i'm just going to copy in that episode id and i send this request now i should get back a not logged in because i need to pass in an off token or a bearer token so i've got this inside of inside of my environment variables inside of here it looks like i can add a new environment inside of the gui here and i don't know let's see oh new environment there we go so let's just call this uh compressed testing sure there's compressed testing and inside of here we want to add variables so we'll say this is the simple cast api key now let me go and grab that and save it in here so you don't see it all right so i actually just saved that as a simple cast api token instead of key so then we come into uh auth let's see what auth gives us here basicos bear token and we can just paste in that token here now i wonder how do we use the actual variable so let's go and look inside of here does it have handcrafted launch blog post let's see if we can go to medium see if there's variables in here has variable support but where do we how do we actually reference those is what i'm looking for maybe it's the same as postman variables let's take a look and see using variables uh okay so it looks like maybe the double double brackets here are double curly brackets is what that is so we want this to be the simple cast api token uh it just turned that green hopefully that means it's actually a valid one let's take a look here let's try to send that and hey we actually get back our stats so uh this is the episodes are brand new so not many downloads here but cool that that actually works so we can include variables looks like we can do collections so we could create a new collection for compressed fm for example if i needed to test out endpoints for that i like that activity will just show the previous requests i've made it looks just like postman and seems to work really well let's take a look at if we pass in body and the data so we can pass it in these different forms cool and then is json nice so it's got um it's got some color coding in here that's pretty sweet so i don't want to get ahead of myself but i feel like this can replace my postman separate application and do everything inside of vs code with this thunder client i'm curious if you're using other tools to test out your http your api request let me know in the comments below also let me know if you tested out this one in vs code i think this is pretty cool the more stuff that i can do in vs code and not have to worry about other applications for me the better anyway let me know what you think in the comments below thanks as always for checking out the video make sure to check out the podcast and i'll catch you next time

Channel: James Q Quick

Views: 881,026

Keywords: postman, thunder client, vs code extensions, http requests, vs code tutorial, thunder client vs code extension, how to test http requests in vs code, rest api, vscode rest client extension, vscode extensions for web developers, visual studio code, vscode extensions, vscode tutorial, how to build a rest api, web development

Id: AbCTlemwZ1k

Length: 5min 48sec (348 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021