Postman is a widely used application programming interface (API) development and testing platform that simplifies the process of designing, testing, and managing APIs. This versatile tool allows developers to create and send HTTP requests, supporting various request types such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. You will start this course by learning about Postman, which will allow you to send requests to HTTP APIs and perform tests on the responses, including unit testing, function testing, and end-to-end testing. Next, you will install Postman and utilize it for making requests. You will configure and set up GET requests to access resources, POST requests to create resources, PUT and PATCH requests to update resources, and DELETE requests to remove resources. Finally, you will experiment with PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests and incorporate query parameters and path variables in your request URLs to specify filters or selection in GET requests. You will also explore headers for requests, allowing specification of information like the acceptable response format.

Postman is a powerful tool for API testing, offering a comprehensive suite of features to streamline the testing process. With Postman, you can create and execute a variety of HTTP requests, including GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, allowing you to thoroughly test different aspects of your API. You will start this course by setting up your own API server utilizing the Flask library from Python. You will send requests using Postman, including basic GET and POST requests, and view the responses. You will learn how to create test scripts to test the responses from your APIs and use them to perform checks, such as verifying the status code or response body to ensure a successful request. Next, you will explore working with collection runners, which allows you to configure scheduled executions or introduce delays between your requests. Then, you will delve into authentication, a crucial aspect in most real-world APIs. Request senders usually authenticate themselves using mechanisms such as basic authentication, digest authentication, and bearer token authentication and you will work with all these authentication types. Finally, you will explore header presets, configuring header fields included in all requests.

In Postman, variables play a pivotal role in enhancing flexibility and efficiency throughout the application programming interface (API) testing and development process. These variables provide a dynamic way to handle changing values, such as ports, URL app routes, or data within a request body. In this course, you will begin by working with variables, including global variables, collection variables, and environment variables, and learning when to use each type. Moving on, you explore secret variables, which keep their value hidden, and thus are ideal for storing sensitive information like passwords. You will see how you can use the UI, pre-request scripts, and tests to configure and access these variables. Next, you delve into request chaining, linking all requests in a collection such that each request depends on the previous ones in sequence. Finally, you explore the Postman command line interface (CLI). You will install this on your local machine and use it to run collections.