Show HN: Insomnia REST Client now open-source

[gschier]

Hey everyone! I've been working on Insomnia for over two years now and am super excited to be able to share it with the world. Let me know if you have any questions.

[hyades]

The process to update Insomnia in Linux is quite painful. the only option is downloading a new .deb every time.

[debaserab2]

Insomnia is awesome and has become my go-to tool for testing REST API's. Your work is very much appreciated. Thank you!!

[paol]

I've been using it since it was featured in HN some time back. It's a very nice improvement over the chrome extensions I had to use in the past.

One question: should I resubmit bugs previously sent to [email protected] to the github bug tracker?

[eddyg]

Does anybody have any direct experience with how this compares to Paw[1] (a "native" Mac app) in terms of performance, features, etc.? I currently use Paw and am happy with it, but this seems like it could potentially be a nice product to recommend to Linux and Windows users.

[1] https://paw.cloud

[gschier]

Just wanted to say that, as the creator of Insomnia, I love Paw. If I didn't need a cross-platform app at my last job, I might have never started working on Insomnia.

[_pdp_]

Try this (https://rest.secapps.com) It is as close as it get to Paw. Also this (https://fuzzer.secapps.com) for fuzz-testing.

[thejosh]

It works quite well on Linux (Ubuntu, XFCE).

[gnud]

Looks very nice!

But: GPLv3 and code generation is a scary combo. Do you sell a commercial license? If not, you should add a license exception.

[gschier]

Good point. I didn't think that GPL-generated code must abide by the same license, but it seems to be a debated topic. Best to be safe.

[jfoutz]

gcc would like to have a word with you.

[matt4077]

You should find out if Harry Potter was written in Word and buy some MS stocks, then.

[kej]

FYI, the blog post and LICENSE file say GPL3, but the bottom of README.md says AGPLv3.

[gschier]

Thanks. Copy-pasta. Fixed.

[timvdalen]

I've been using Insomnia for the past couple of months (switched from Postman) and I'm really liking it. The workspace switching is especially powerful.

One thing though: every time the auto-updater runs, it places a shortcut on my desktop (Windows), which is really annoying.

[deepanchor]

How does this compare to Postman?

[mod]

I greatly prefer it, although if postman doesn't have any annoyances for you, then insomnia might not be better for your use case.

Mostly the environments & variables make insomnia pretty fantastic.

[tthayer]

It isn't dependent on your browser, which has made testing much more reliable in my use cases. My workplace uses a lot of single-sign-on stuff which makes it hard to authenticate using service accounts and whatnot.

[simplify]

It loads much faster, which matters a great deal to me.

[BrunoJo]

A "Run in Insomnia" button would be great which I could add to the API documentation of my project (like this insomnia://run?method=post&url=example.com%2Fapi%2F)

[gschier]

That would be awesome. I just added a (still undocumented) protocol handler to import remote files (like insomnia://app/import?uri=https://foo.bar/file.json).

Putting the data right in the URL would be awesome as well, though.

[nbrempel]

I work on a system that integrates with several APIs of varying degrees of quality. Using Insomnia easily saves me hours of effort every week.

[freestockoption]

Ooh, I wonder if this supports Swagger.

[CodyReichert]

I'd be interested to know this as well. I've been solving this problem while building Assertible; generate a suite of API tests from a Swagger spec: https://assertible.com/blog/testing-an-api-using-swagger

[max23_]

Thanks, this looks neat! I like how you output the SSL handshake in the "Timeline" tab.

[tthayer]

I use this nearly every day and it has really helped me build better middleware to connect various REST APIs together. Well worth $50/year.

[gschier]

Thanks! Glad it's helping :)

[rhinoceraptor]

Is there any plan to support importing the Postman v4 data format?

[gschier]

I assume you mean version 4 of the Postman application. Version 4 of Postman can export v1 or v2 formats (the version of the export format itself), which can be selected when exporting a single Postman collection.