What is Insomnia REST?

Key takeaways:
Insomnia REST is a user-friendly interface that simplifies the design, testing, and debugging of APIs with an intuitive layout.
Insomnia REST allows customization of headers, parameters, and authentication methods for precise API interactions.
Provides detailed responses, including beautified JSON/XML, for easier analysis and debugging.

Insomnia is an open-source REST API client used for designing, testing and debugging APIs. It supports various protocols, including GraphQL, REST, WebSockets, server-sent events (SSE), gRPC, and any other HTTP-compatible protocol. Its user-friendly and easy-to-use interface and advanced functionality make it a go-to choice for developers and testers alike.

Why use Insomnia?

In addition to making working with APIs as simple as possible, Insomnia also allows developers full control over API requests, enabling them to customize headers, query parameters, request bodies, authentication methods, and more.

Insomnia provides a comprehensive and structured response to API requests, including status codes, headers, and response bodies. It also allows for beautifying JSON and XML responses, making it easier to analyze and debug API data. Additionally, support for environment variables and workspaces, as well as code generation in various programming languages to help developers integrate API calls into their applications quickly, is also a part of Insomnia’s arsenal.

Key features of Insomnia REST

The following are some of the key features of Insomnia REST:

API design: Creates and manages API specifications using OpenAPI and generates interactive documentation directly from the API definition for easy reference.
Request building and testing: Creates HTTP requests with various methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) and sets headers, parameters, and bodies.
Environments and variables: Manages multiple environments with different base URLs, authentication credentials, and other variables.
Authentication and authorization: Supports various authentication mechanisms, including basic auth, Bearer tokens, API keys, and OAuth.
Code generation: Generates client-side code over twelve languages (e.g., JavaScript, Python, Ruby) from your API definition.

Installing Insomnia

Installing Insomnia is pretty straightforward. Just download the installer from the official website. For Windows and MacOS, Click on the installer and follow the on-screen instructions to install Insomnia. For Linux, use the package manager specific to your Linux distribution to install Insomnia using the installer.

Sending API requests

As stated before, Insomnia offers a user-friendly interface for sending API requests. The following demonstration provides a step-by-step guide to creating a GET request using Insomnia:

GET: http://localhost:3000/api (to get all the data)
GET: http://localhost:3000/api/{author} (to get the data of the specifed author only)
PUT: http://localhost:3000/api/{author} (to modify the data of the specifed author. dont forget to add a JSON body)
POST: http://localhost:3000/api (to add new data to the database. dont forget to add a JSON body)
DELETE: http://localhost:3000/api/{author} (to delete data of the specified author}
DELETE: http://localhost:3000/api (to delete all the data in the database}

URLs for various API requests

#!/usr/bin/env node

/**
 * Module dependencies.
 */

var app = require('../app');
var debug = require('debug')('books-project:server');
var http = require('http');

/**
 * Get port from environment and store in Express.
 */

var port = normalizePort(process.env.PORT || '3000');
app.set('port', port);

/**
 * Create HTTP server.
 */

var server = http.createServer(app);

/**
 * Listen on provided port, on all network interfaces.
 */

server.listen(port);
server.on('error', onError);
server.on('listening', onListening);

/**
 * Normalize a port into a number, string, or false.
 */

function normalizePort(val) {
  var port = parseInt(val, 10);

  if (isNaN(port)) {
    // named pipe
    return val;
  }

  if (port >= 0) {
    // port number
    return port;
  }

  return false;
}

/**
 * Event listener for HTTP server "error" event.
 */

function onError(error) {
  if (error.syscall !== 'listen') {
    throw error;
  }

  var bind = typeof port === 'string'
    ? 'Pipe ' + port
    : 'Port ' + port;

  // handle specific listen errors with friendly messages
  switch (error.code) {
    case 'EACCES':
      console.error(bind + ' requires elevated privileges');
      process.exit(1);
      break;
    case 'EADDRINUSE':
      console.error(bind + ' is already in use');
      process.exit(1);
      break;
    default:
      throw error;
  }
}

/**
 * Event listener for HTTP server "listening" event.
 */

function onListening() {
  var addr = server.address();
  var bind = typeof addr === 'string'
    ? 'pipe ' + addr
    : 'port ' + addr.port;
  debug('Listening on ' + bind);
}

Testing REST APIs using Insomnia