Manage and Automate Postman with the API

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The Postman API Platform lets you create a variety of resources to support every stage of your API development workflow, including:

  • Workspaces — Contain assets you can share with your internal and external teams.
  • Collections — Organize your requests that share a common purpose.
  • Environments — Use sets of scoped variables in your requests.
  • APIs — Define different API standards, such as OpenAPI, GraphQL, or gRPC.
  • Mock servers — Simulate the behavior of real API servers.
  • Monitors — Run requests from the Postman cloud on a defined schedule.

You can manage these resources—along with users, permissions, and Flows—directly in the Postman desktop or web app. But if you’re looking to automate your workflow, the Postman API makes it easy to programmatically manage these resources, helping you save time and reduce manual effort.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what the Postman API can do and how it can boost your productivity.

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Endpoints available to all plans

The following endpoints are available to all users, regardless of Postman plan:

Workspaces

Use the Workspaces API to efficiently manage your Postman workspaces. Create temporary workspaces for testing and remove them when no longer needed to keep your account organized. Back up entire workspaces or specific resources—such as collections or APIs—using the Postman API.

Collections

Use the Collections endpoints to manage your Postman Collections with greater control and flexibility. These endpoints support standard CRUD operations and streamline collection-related workflows, including:

  • Partial updates — Modify part of a collection—such as its name, description, authentication, variables, or scripts—without needing to replace the entire object.
  • Item-level operations — These endpoints let you create, update, or delete individual Postman requests, folders, and responses. This is especially useful for large collections where updates with PUT can be error-prone.
  • Transfers — Move items between collections or folders, and reorder folders within a collection programmatically.
  • Forks — Programmatically create and merge collection forks to support collaborative workflows or versioning.

Additionally, you can:

These capabilities enable automation between your API definitions and Postman. When collections are kept in sync, dependent resources—like monitors, mock servers, and tests—stay up to date with minimal manual intervention.

Forks and pull requests

The Postman API allows you to fork collections and environments to support collaborative workflows. You can pull source changes from the original, create new forks, merge existing ones, and get a list of all forks associated with your collections and environments.

Additionally, you can manage your collections’ pull requests programmatically. This includes creating new pull requests to propose changes, retrieving details of existing pull requests, and using the Pull Requests endpoints to review, update, or merge them. These capabilities enable smooth collaboration and version control directly within your Postman workflows.

Variables and environments

Postman supports three types of variables—global, environment, and collection—and you can update all of them programmatically using the Postman API.

  • Global variables are accessible across an entire workspace. Manage them using the Global Variables endpoints.
  • Environment variables let you scope requests to specific environments like dev, test, or prod. These are managed with the Environments endpoints.
  • Collection variables are available to all requests within a collection and can be updated through the Update part of a collection endpoint.

This simplifies maintaining consistent configurations across environments and supports automation within your existing workflows.

API Builder and Specs

The API and Specs endpoints offer straightforward CRUD operations to manage your APIs in Postman.

The API Builder endpoints support:

  • Modifying API definitions using schemas.
  • Programmatically creating and publishing versions of your API for your consumers.
  • Managing and automatically syncing collections linked to an API.

Spec Hub endpoints allow you to:

These endpoints provide the tools you’ll need to manage your API lifecycle and ensuring consistency across definitions and collections.

Mock servers

Postman mock servers are based on collections, so modifying a collection with Collections endpoints directly affects the behavior of any associated mock server.

In addition, the Mocks endpoints allow you to manage mock servers independently, with support for standard CRUD operations. Key features include:

This level of control enables more flexible testing and simulation workflows, especially when working with evolving APIs or isolated environments.

Monitors

The Monitors endpoints allow you to automate collection runs on a schedule or in response to events within your CI/CD workflows. With these endpoints, you can:

  • Run a monitor synchronously or asynchronously. Trigger a monitor and wait for the results in real time or pull the job execution status.
  • Create and run a webhook—special monitors that run collections based on external events.

Users and groups

Use the Groups endpoints to retrieve information about Postman user groups, or the Users endpoints to access details about members of your Postman team.

For insights into your API usage and limits, refer to the authenticated user endpoint (/me).

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Enterprise or Professional plans

If you’re a Postman Enterprise or Professional plan user, you can use the following endpoints:

Private API Network

The Postman Private API Network provides a centralized directory for your team’s internal workspaces, collections, and APIs. With the API, you can manage network elements and approve or reject contributions.

This functionality enables you to automate internal documentation management, integrate with your CI/CD pipelines, and ensure that your team’s documentation remains current and reliable.

Tags

Postman’s API includes Tags endpoints that let you manage tags across your collections, APIs, and workspaces. You can add, update, or delete tags to keep your Postman elements organized at scale.

Need to filter by a specific tag? The Get elements by tag endpoint lets you fetch all elements associated with a specific tag so you can take action on them programmatically.

Secret Scanner

The Secret Scanner endpoints, which programmatically provide the same functionality as the Secret Scanner dashboard, allow Enterprise Ultimate customers to manage their secrets detected by the Postman Secret Scanner. You can:

  • Search detected secrets in a paginated response format.
  • Find the location of a detected secret.
  • Update the resolution status of a detected secret.

These endpoints enable you to build automatic notification systems, or to programmatically resolve detected secrets.

SCIM

Postman supports SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) endpoints, allowing you to automate how users and groups are provisioned in your organization. By integrating with your identity provider, you can manage access to Postman at scale—ideal for larger teams and enterprise environments.

The Postman API includes SCIM-specific endpoints that let you provision and deprovision users, manage user groups, and maintain centralized control over access through your IdP. This makes it easier to streamline onboarding and ensure the right people have the right access without the hassle of manual updates.

API security and governance

The API Security endpoints enable you to manage your API’s security by performing security checks and validating governance rules. For example, the API definition security validation endpoint allows you to validate an OpenAPI definition before you publish it. If it passes validation, you can proceed to publish a new version of your API with confidence.

Audit logs

The Audit Logs endpoints enable team admins to monitor and analyze activity within Professional or Enterprise Postman teams. You can review audit logs filtered by specific criteria to track:

  • When users were added, removed, or invited to the team.
  • Which user performed an action and the exact time it occurred.

These capabilities provide transparency and help maintain security and compliance across your team.

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The Postman API provides a comprehensive set of endpoints to programmatically manage your Postman resources and streamline organizational workflows. How have you used the Postman API to automate your development processes? Share your use cases and tips with us!

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My usage of this is Terraform. I am the author of the postman Terraform provider which I use for all of my postman admin automation.

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