Hello All,
I would like to understand at what point developers prefer specialized API tools Postman over simplified/manual API test workflows.
Currently, during development, we test APIs manually, as we have been doing since the inception of the API. Manually testing APIs (at least in the early stages) was sufficient. However, over time, the number of API endpoints as well as the integrations have increased exponentially.
The system includes:
- auth flows
- image uploads
- webhook endpoints
- async/background jobs
- polling requests
- admin APIs
- order APIs
- notification systems
- third party systems
With continued growth of the system, we are now experiencing the following challenges:
confusion between staging/live endpoints
repeated authentication steps
inconsistent environment variables
forgetting request parameters between tests
difficulty tracking older test requests
debugging async workflows becoming time-consuming
As it stands, we manually test our APIs while in the process of developing, however, I am starting to believe that even in a short time, we will reach a point when this will be difficult to maintain.
Given the issues stated above, and as I learn Postman, I am especially interested in hearing from other Postman users how they have handled the following issues:
- How do you structure collections when the number of endpoints is large?
- How do you handle many requests that require different auth tokens?
- Is using environments sufficient to manage staging, production, and local systems?
- How do you test long-running async jobs in Postman?
- What do you recommend as a workflow when your project has uploads and background processing jobs?
I am especially interested in your real world examples since many of the examples you can find online are quite small and simple compared to a real production workflow.
The API and tools we are developing are for a custom php eCommerce and image processing platform https://ajgar.com/, where the number of requests and integrations keeps increasing over time.