Working in offline mode

No offence to the design and developments teams but removing
offline work was one of the dumbest ideas I have
ever seen in a software update, whenever I restart the application or computer shuts down unexpectedly, postman forgets my data and I have the retype my web sockets end points, Jeez, can it get worse than this?. you need to help developers concentrate on business logic and coding, not on figuring out work arounds in your tool

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Kevin,

You are missing the point. We do not want to use the scratch pad. We want to be able to benefit from the full feature set of Postman while working offline. We cannot use it online for security reasons. Those customers of your who are not aware of the security implications of doing development online will sooner or later be able to read about themselves in the press. Remember SolarWinds?

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Hey all! :wave:

Just looking to chime in a little here. Iā€™m still a bit new but Iā€™ve noticed this is a common complaint that some people feel our offline features are lacking. While my ability to help here is limited :sweat_smile:, I can help provide information on our current tools and also raise visibility to other team members.

There are a few related feature requests on our Github at the moment such as here and here.

Generally working in offline mode means your files are in the Postman Scratch Pad.

If you are missing data, double check your Scratch Pad or try logging out and back in again. If this is not working, you can also try this resource. Otherwise I would recommend opening a support ticket.

I wish I could be of more help here, but I appreciate your patience! :clap:

I would like to ask about offline model. @vk.postman stated that ā€œPostmanā€™s mission is to improve your API workflows by providing collaborative toolsā€ and " With v8, the only thing thatā€™s changed is the way we handle this. 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 would like to test GRPC and Iā€™m in organisation that have policy that block me from sync to the cloud. Why GRPC is available only in workspace mode? If I understand right for now some functionality will be available only in cloud even I donā€™t need to collaborate?

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Hi, anyone knows if this issue still exist in v9?

Yes, why canā€™t I find my workspace and collections when I switch to scratch pad.
It is so painful to start exporting each collection the switch to scratch pad and import.
How can I the downgrade to version 7 and never to upgrade, I can not be online always for me to work with postman.

We also need way to keep working offline. Postman should at least cache most recent version you used so that it keeps functioning in those situations.

I have the same requirement. There should be no dependency on an internet connection to continue working on any project. I do not collaborate with other teams and work independently which also should not matter. My requirement is to test peripherals without an internet connection. To simulate this I disconnect my LAN from the internet. At that point Postman loses its head completely. Funny that testing my devices in offline mode breaks Postman which is what Iā€™m trying to test for specifically. Scratch pad which I tried seems a bit silly since all the scripts I need are in my workspace which is unavailable. I should not have to put Postman into a special configuration to work offline. Everything Iā€™m working on should be local. Please enhance, fix, improveā€¦ Thanks

Just found this thread. My internet has been out, postman was working fine offline until I restarted my machine, now itā€™s the only thing blocking my local api development. Scratch pad isnā€™t even opening without internet

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After years of working with postman, I upgraded from v6 or v7 to v10 and now itā€™s completely useless!!! Why would you do this??? I use postman to send configuration data to IOT devices, Iā€™m connected directly to the IOT devices so I have no internet connection while working, and know all my saved configuration requests are unavailable!!! All the tabs say ā€œunable to load dataā€, if I close Postman I canā€™t even open it againā€¦ itā€™s a messā€¦ my data should be local, it had always worked fineā€¦ the scratch pad suggestion is useless unless thereā€™s a way to automatically send all my workspace requests to the scratch padā€¦

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What kind of *** locks local development behind an always on online connection?? How can I trust your tool when at the time I need it most it just locks everything behind an arbitrary lock with absolutely zero reason for it? That has to be the biggest dev misstep I have seen

Coincidentally, what replacement apps, preferably open-source, do you guys recommend?

I got burned by this last month. I had a 9hr flight and I thought ā€œomg! 9 hours of dev time without my phone ringing! Heaven!ā€

Got on the plane, sat down, opened postman andā€¦ yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

After the intial shock, I followed the prompt to go into Scratch Pad and started to re-create my environment and requestsā€¦

Starting with my __xsrf request whichā€¦ which was when I hit a wallā€¦

Iā€™m working on a Laravel API and the first time I created that request was by reading other peopleā€™s experience through google. I would never remember that I needed to create a Test on the request, or even what it would look like. And now I also had no access to googleā€¦

So I just kinda sat there, looking at the ā€œComputer Says Noā€ message in postman.

A tool that is not ready for me to use, when I need it, is not a tool that is useful to me.

re: Earlier posts about ā€œcollaborationā€

There are ways to achieve collaboration with users that are offline too - through the use of offline transaction queues and data caches, etc. This feature clearly doesnā€™t exist in postman and so thatā€™s why weā€™re getting the response of ā€œfocus on collaborationā€. The truth is that there just isnā€™t an aswer to this problem yet.

What I donā€™t know is whether the ā€œofflineā€ use case is important enough to their bottom line for them to do something about it. I can practically hear the PM saying ā€œwellā€¦ most devs are always online so the offline sync is just an edge caseā€ā€¦

ā€¦until their own servers go down (as I can see they have done in the past).

Anywayā€¦ Postman secured $225M in series D funding in 2021 (Postman Closes $225 Million Series D Round at a $5.6 Billion Valuation to Power the API-First World | Business Wire) - they are a company, after all, that is trying to make money.

If this ā€œofflineā€ feature-gap is a big enough for you, vote for it with your wallet.

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Yupā€¦ I was recently on a plane flight and settled in to do some work, and couldnā€™t access my workspace to test anything on localhost. Incredibly frustrating and counter-productive, especially when it used to work just fine.

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Its disaster.
People are working on plane, behind vpn, just simply locally.

Who made decision restrict offline working for developers?

I need to work behind vpn and canā€™t connect to postman requests at all, so found this thread.

Scratch Pad need re-import on postman restart, which not huge problem.

BUT Scratch Pad is working poorly (Version 10.8.3). ā€œpm.collectionVariables.setā€ is not working. So I canā€™t just export-import my collection and work locally without effort.

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Latest version of Postman is so bad, canā€™t even import a collection when working offline. Forced to go back to Postman 9 just to be able to use Postman Collection.

Online only changes are so stupid. I work using a remote machine, which doesnā€™t have internet access. And the latest Postman is only usable for single requests.

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Same problem here, it looks like theyā€™re going to charge for basic stuffā€¦ Idkā€¦ Since they implemented that variety of plans, free postman just keep getting worst, Iā€™m thinking on migrating to Insomnia or something built in with Intellij

I came here to say exactly this. I love using Postmanā€¦but, if you force us to sign in and use it online, Iā€™m out. This totally sucks. This might not kill Postmanā€¦but, Iā€™m guessing it will take a hit.

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Unfortunately I have to pile on here. The inability to use Postman without some kind of internet connectivity or cloud account is extremely unfortunate. Iā€™ve been using Postman almost every day for over 5 years and without an ability to use it in an ā€œofflineā€ type state is completely unacceptable and Iā€™ll have to use other tools. A shame, really, because I liked it so much. I want to add my encouragement to support the ability to just use the product without any reason to connect to the internet.

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The lightweight Postman client can be used offline, Iā€™m using it here without an internet connection to call a basic local nodejs server.

I understand I can use Postman in this capacity, but I am specifically referring to the inability to reference saved posts or utilize collections. I donā€™t understand why an account is required. I used to have hundreds of saved, re-usable posts that I count on to exercise existing APIs or test new ones, and now those are inaccessible without an internet connection and signing into an account.

I guess this is my small way of asking for offline support for collections.

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