Why automate your API tests?
More software companies are using APIs than ever before, which means the risk is even greater for malicious users to exploit these APIs to access or change application data.
So, it’s important to regularly test API functionality to make sure our requests to the server are behaving as we expect them to.
Postman is a free tool that lets us test the requests and responses of our APIs. With Postman, it’s easy to create and duplicate request, use JavaScript to assert on responses, organize your tests, and run your tests as an automated test suite.
Join me in this course and learn how to create reliable automation for any API you work with.
Setting up your test environment
Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video
There are a few things you’ll need in order to take this course. First, you’ll need to have Postman. You can get the free version of Postman by going to Click on the download button
that is appropriate for your operating system. Next, you’ll need to have Node installed. You can do a quick check to see if you already have node installed by opening a command window and typing node — version.
If you get a version number such as 19.3.0 in response, you already have Node installed. It’s okay if your version number is different from mine. If you don’t have Node installed, you can get it by going here: https://nodejs.org.
Choose the LTS version and follow the installation instructions. Once you have Node installed, you should have npm installed automatically. You can check to see if it’s installed by running this in a command window:
npm — version.
If you get a version number in response, npm is installed. It’s okay if your version number is different from mine. If it’s not installed, you may have a very old version of Node.
Go to the Node installation page and update your version. Now it’s time to install Newman. Newman is the command line runner that runs our Postman tests. Simply type in the command line npm install -g newman. This will install Newman globally on your machine.
Note that all URLs mentioned in this course are linked in the exercise file named Postman Essential Training Course Links. Once you have Postman, Node, npm, and Newman installed, you are all ready to take this course.
