‫Now before we can move on to
‫writing some actual express code,
‫we first need to install yet
‫another tool,
‫and this time it's an
‫app called Postman.
‫And Postman is a beautiful tool
‫that allows us to do API testing.
‫It's a little bit like a browser
‫but it doesn't render any html
‫or any visible websites to us.
‫Instead we can do all kinds of requests
‫and then receive the response simply
‫as text then work with that response.
‫So as they say Postman simplifies API development
‫and that really is true.
‫And that kind of is the standard
‫application that you will see everyone
‫using basically for testing APIs.
‫But you can do a lot more than just testing
‫and we will see many of these features
‫throughout this course.
‫For now, just head over to getpostman.com
‫So, as you can see here in the url
‫and then here on product, just hit Postman.
‫Then finally download the app,
‫and then download.
‫So, I'm not going to download it right now,
‫of course I already have it installed.
‫And so let's now take a look at how
‫Postman actually works.
‫So I'm going to open up Postman.
‫That takes a little time,
‫and so here we go this is
‫how Postman looks like.
‫And probably when you downloaded yours,
‫it's going to be in a light version,
‫but if you like the dark mode, like me,
‫just open up the settings and on themes,
‫you can just use the dark theme over here.
‫All right, so as I said, it's a little
‫bit like a browser where in here we
‫can enter a url and do the request.
‫Now, it does allow us to do all kinds
‫of requests, where in the browser
‫whatever we put in here in the url bar,
‫it's always going to be a get request.
‫But here we can change that, we can use
‫get or post or put or patch and all
‫these http methods here.
‫Where some of them we have already
‫talked about before, and will keep
‫talking about in this section. Okay?
‫Now just to test it very quickly,
‫Let's use again the dog API that we used before.
‫So that was at
‫dog.ceo
‫then dog API then let's
‫just simply use this url here
‫Okay. And so all we have to do is
‫to put it here, this case we really want
‫a get request and then send.
‫And after some time, it should
‫then show up down here.
‫And indeed, here we go.
‫So, that is the Json data just
‫as we expected it. Okay.
‫So it looks exactly like what
‫we have here.
‫Right?
‫Now we can then actually save
‫these requests here, and we
‫can create collections and folders
‫to organize our requests.
‫We can run automatic tests.
‫We can set up different development
‫environments or production environments
‫and all kinds of other useful stuff.
‫Like sending data in the body for
‫a post request or a patch request.
‫Or we can set headers or really,
‫all you can imagine about building APIs.
‫So from now on, in the next couple sections,
‫we're always going to be using
‫Postman to run or request.
‫Okay.
‫So this was just a very quick demo
‫of Postman so that starting now
‫we can start building our API
‫then test it using this tool.