Show HN: Restfox – A web based HTTP client inspired by Insomnia and Postman

[kermire]

Hey HN, I built this because I wanted a portable version of Insomnia I could access anywhere I am, without installing anything. The application is a PWA, so it will not load resources again after the first load, unless there's an update. It uses IndexedDB and loads quite fast even with a lot of nested requests and folders.

Import from Postman and Insomnia is available making it easy to import your pre-existing request collections.

Only limitation is that it only supports CORS enabled endpoints for now. I plan to add cors proxy support later on. There is of course the electron build (https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox/releases/tag/v0.0.1), which can be used to bypass cors but that kinda defeats the portability of the app but it is an option.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox

[iamandras]

Nice job. It really feels like postman. So there is no server behind it, right?

[kermire]

Thanks. There's no server behind it. It runs completely in the browser.

[joshxyz]

awesome, how does it compare to hoppscotch?

[kermire]

I haven't used hoppscotch much. But from what I know:

1) Both Restfox and Hoppscotch run completely within the browser without needing a backend server to process the http requests.

2) Restfox has a plugin system. Hoppscotch currently does not have a plugin system but they're in the process of adding it.

3) Hoppscotch doesn't support for nested environment variables since it follows Postman rather than Insomnia.

4) Restfox can import exports from Postman and Insomnia. Hoppscotch can also do this but you might struggle to find their import button.

5) Restfox does not have GraphQL or WebSocket support.

6) Compared to Hoppscotch, you'll notice the UI is much more straightforward and gets out of your way. Gives you the familiarity of the desktop http clients you're used to. But this is my personal opinion.