Working in offline mode

I work from home over crappy satellite internet which makes my VPN unstable, so there are times when Iā€™ll end up disconnecting multiple times a day. Normally this isnā€™t a problem, however, with the latest 8.x updates I canā€™t bloody work on ANYTHING in Postman because Iā€™m not online. I mean seriously, I canā€™t even change the request body? If I wanted to have to be online to use Postman, Iā€™d sign into the web version.

THIS.

Iā€™m the ONLY open-source developer in my department, which means collaboration is virtually non-existent. If I donā€™t care one whit about collaborating with other people, why on Earth would I want to be FORCED to use some ā€œcollaboration modeā€ that REQUIRES me to be online?

Do none of you guys use local Docker containers to run dev APIs? I donā€™t care if I canā€™t get to yahoo.com when Iā€™m trying to test a local server!

Not allowing me to make edits to my tests is not actually helpful, guys.

Knowingly forcing users to jump through hoops to try to get back expected application behavior isnā€™t helpful either.

Why do we have to do this? Why was this backwards-incompatible regression allowed as a feature? This is a serious UI/UX faux pas when during NORMAL operation we suddenly lose access to our existing data. Even worse, instead of having a nice little button that says ā€œhey, would you like to import your existing stuff into the scratchpad?ā€, we ALL have to go through the SAME annoying import/export mechanism nonsense to keep our code, and THEN do it all over again to get it back up into a usable workspace. Itā€™s the same steps each time, so why the heck do we have to deal with this manually?

  • USERS should be able to make the choice between personal/collaborative workspaces.
  • USERS should be the ones to decide whether or not our tests should be backed up to the cloud.
  • USERS should be able to work locally offline without having to manually juggle importing/exporting collections and re-setting up environments/variables

Postman is awesome. Getting new features in Postman is awesome. Having tools to make it easier to work with remote peers is also awesome.

Being unilaterally forced to use this new mandatory ā€œalways onlineā€ paradigm with no say so, especially when it only makes my job harder, is most definitely the exact opposite of awesome.

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The scratch pad is meant to be inherently offline, and anything you create here stays offline and will never be confused with the online experience within workspaces

I believe thatā€™s not a solution for our issue here. If I work within a team, with shared workspaces, as long as I donā€™t come online, I canā€™t access the workspaces, even though they may be cached on my machine.

I donā€™t mind if my workspace does not update, perfectly fine, I donā€™t mind either if you tell me that any change to the workspace will not be saved and uploaded, or merged once online - fair game.
Just let me access, and use them.

To me itā€™s like a soft-lock, because I can open Postman outside the VPN, and connect to the VPN again when it has verified i was online. Instead of forcing to download the new workspace, just allow us to open the version of it we have on our machine, and let us know that ā€œThis workspace may be outdated and changes may not be saved onlineā€ or something like thisā€¦

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Iā€™m facing this issue tooā€¦ Itā€™s been a nightmare

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So, my ADSL line went down. Could I continue working with Postman in my local machine environment (rhetorical question)? This is really a problem.

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Could you expand on the reasons why you feel using the Scratch Pad is pointless - If you elaborate more on your context and current workflow, it will help us to better understand.

Wow, I really admire your politeness and diplomacy :grinning:

And to all the people whinging about Version 8 not working? How would you feel if someone commented on your software along the lines of ā€œOh, your software is useless. It doesnā€™t workā€.

No further explanation, just a pointless rant. Wouldnā€™t you feel a bit p*ssed off?

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I agree that it is certainly not helpful to rant and complain without giving constructive feedbackā€¦ I also understand why all these people are angry, it seems like a use-case has been completely overlooked in the v7 ā†’ v8 upgrade.

As I struggled with the same issue, and ultimately had to revert back to 7, I will try to summarize to make the feedback useful:

For many systems on enterprise networks, outgoing data is not allowed, and is blocked by firewalls or proxies. For some this is only while on VPN, but for others using strictly enterprise devices, this block cannot be avoided (which is my scenario). While previously you could still create collections, intercept requests and cookies, etc. while ā€œofflineā€, much of that has been restricted with v8.

Scratch Pad allows some of the functionality again, but is lacking in many areas that were still available in version 7. I donā€™t use Postman for many complicated things, but the one area missing for me with Scratch Pad was the request/cookie interceptor, which I regularly used in v7 and had become a core part of several of my collections for testing endpoints. Iā€™m sure there are other restrictions, but this one alone was enough to force me to downgrade to v7 again.

To summarize some feedback that I would love to see, but I understand you all are busy and have priorities:

  • Scratch Pad is somewhat difficult to findā€¦ It might be helpful, instead of just showing the ā€œIt appears that youā€™re offlineā€ error and showing nothing, maybe also showing the option to switch to Scratch Pad to work offline?
  • It would be nice for some of the previous tools (such as the interceptor) to work even when using Scratch Pad
  • This one is incredibly minor, but the Scratch Pad mode notification is very bright and blatant, and there is no way to dismiss it as far as I could tellā€¦ It would be nice to be able to close it, even if it starts open any time you open Postman :slight_smile:

Thank you for all the hard work that you do; Postman is a really incredible toolā€¦ I like the way v8 looks; Iā€™m really hoping Iā€™ll be able to use it at work sometime in the future :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Thank you so much @monstro222 for penning this down.

I would suggest adding all feature requests on our issue tracker:

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I encountered the same problem, closing and opening the application didnā€™t work. But I found out there were some processes of Postman running in the background. Stopping them in the Task Manager solved the problem, it worked after I tried to start the application again.

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As long as I donā€™t come online, I canā€™t access the workspaces, even though they may be available on my machine

I downgraded to version 7.

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Hello
So after one of our Business Architects had the same issue she contacted me and we found out in the proxy logs that Postman was generating traffic to different URLs when launching it
If content inspection was turned on on these pages Postman failed and was in offline mode.
We made an exception on HTTPS Content Inspection on below URLs and Postman (version 8) started working:

*.getpostman.com
dl.postman.io
*.gw.postman.com
*.postmanlabs.com

Not very practical to make such exceptions for postman to workā€¦ Could you check this and maybe fix so it can work properly on company networks that have a Proxy (like most do)
Because all our other users of Postman have not upgraded to V8 and have not faced this issue yet. So it shows that this is something new that was introduced with this version that is incompatible with Proxiesā€¦

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Hi @ianarus - can you please provide your feedback on our GitHub issue tracker? Itā€™s the best place to raise concerns about bugs or make feature requests. Thanks!

@hannah.neil I came here expressly to avoid polluting your issues list with FAQ-like bugs such as ā€œwhy are you making it impossible to use this tool behind a firewallā€ and ā€œwhy is it so much work, having to export all my data piecemealā€. But, I may end up having to do just that. :frowning:

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Well, perhaps this explains why my Postman app keeps forgetting all my data, every time I restart it. :frowning:

Same issueā€¦ the upgrade for Postman version 8 adds a set of non-functional communications requirements that cannot function behind a proxyā€¦ when testing with the proxy bypassed, then it works.

Also agree that bypassing the proxy isnā€™t going to be acceptable to any Cyber Security teams, so this isnā€™t a functional resolution.

Downgrading back to v7 seems to be the best fix right now until PostMan fixes this issue with their new software build. Hopefully this gets fixed soon, or the next step will be to look for an alternate software to replace Postman.

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Hey @merlin2880
Welcome to the Postman community !!
Can you shed some more light on the proxy environment that you are working on, Is it a VPN+proxy-based setup? Any information around the vendor information that is used in your environment will help. Also, let us know how often you have to authenticate the proxy inside your environment

I have been using Postman for a little over 4 years now, and I appreciate the wonderful work done by the Postman Team and community at large. I, however have the following observations, based on my usage:

  1. It should be easy and seamless to use Postman when connected to the internet and when offline. This never was an issue, and it is until recently when i started having power issues at my home office that i realised how important it is to have both features available. I understand that the Postman Team has valid reasons as to why this was implemented the way it was, but I believe many people are struggling with this. The idea of a Scratchpad does feel a bit detached from my workspace. It even sounds so TEMPORARY.

  2. I should be able to work alone, on the same collection, with an option to back up to the cloud if I so choose.

  3. When collaborating with others, I should have the power to work offline and sync the changes with the rest of the team whenever online.

  4. Before code goes online, it must be developed and tested locally. Using the same analogy, it makes sense to have the ability to test local APIs, without necessarily being connected to the internet.

Considering everyone, it is not so practical to enforce that users must be online to enjoy the features that make Postman awesome. Some have intermittent power supply - no wifi when power is off, some have restrictive Internet connections at their respective work stations, and a whole other collection of issues (no pun intended).

Once again, I appreciate the amazing work by the Postman team + community.

Letā€™s keep making the tool awesome!

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Does anyone know an analogue of the postman program with offline mode, without synchronization with the cloud and with the ability to import collections from postman? No more strength to endure this postman with his ā€œimprovementsā€. Help ME!

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Where is the data stored when successful sync?
Why is there NO DATA in offline mode after successful sync?

@sergeevichvn Someone posted this yesterday when postman did not work for several hours:
The API Design Platform and API Client - Insomnia
Source code is on Github: GitHub - Kong/insomnia: The Open Source API Client and Design Platform for GraphQL, REST and gRPC

It seems to be far from Postman in regards to featues, but it seems to work offline. I just started using it to have an alternative to Postman for when Iā€™m ā€œofflineā€ ā€¦ (or at least Postman tries to convince me, that I am)

[Edit] Just found out, that you could also Extend Insomnia with plugins:
Plugin Hub - Insomnia

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unfortunately, this application does not import collections correctly, as I understand there is no pre script