Hi everyone, I manage a restaurant-focused website that shares information about Texas Roadhouse menus, deals, and reviews. My site’s backend exposes a few REST API endpoints that I’m trying to test and document using Postman. However, over the last few days, I’ve been running into strange timeout and authorization errors that don’t happen when I access the same endpoints directly through the browser or from my app. I’m not sure if it’s a Postman configuration issue or something wrong with my server setup.
The first issue is with basic GET requests. When I send a request like GET ``https://mywebsite.com/api/menus, Postman either hangs indefinitely or returns “Error: socket hang up” after about 20 seconds. Oddly enough, if I paste the same URL into the browser, it returns the expected JSON within a second. I’ve tried disabling SSL verification in Postman, changing the timeout settings, and testing from different networks, but the result is the same.
My second problem involves authentication. I use a Bearer token system to protect certain API routes (like /api/reviews/add and /api/coupons). The token works perfectly in my frontend app, but when I include it in Postman’s Authorization header, I often get “401 Unauthorized” even though the token is valid. I copied it directly from a working session in the browser console, so it’s definitely not expired. Could this be a header formatting issue or something with CORS or SameSite cookie policies?
I also noticed inconsistent behavior with POST requests. When I send form data (for example, submitting a review or a coupon code), Postman sometimes returns “400 Bad Request” with no additional error details, even though I’m using the correct JSON format. When I inspect the server logs, it looks like the body is being received as empty. I’ve tried changing the content type between application/json and x-www-form-urlencoded, but it doesn’t seem to help.
Another weird thing is that when I test the same endpoints using curl from the command line, everything works perfectly — no timeouts, no auth errors, and the data is processed correctly. That makes me think the issue might be specific to how Postman sends requests or how my server interprets them. My backend runs on Node.js with Express, deployed via Nginx reverse proxy, and I’ve confirmed that SSL and request headers are configured properly there.
Has anyone else experienced something similar where Postman can’t properly connect or authenticate with a live production API while other tools can? I’d really appreciate any insights into what I might be missing maybe something related to HTTP/2, proxy settings, or Postman’s request behavior. My goal is to use Postman to test, monitor, and document my restaurant website’s API, but right now the inconsistency is making debugging very difficult. Sorry for the long post!