GraphQL Support

Many people think of Postman as an advanced REST client. But there's more: Beyond REST, Postman is a tool that handles any calls sent over HTTP, and that now includes GraphQL.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs. GraphQL APIs are becoming more popular with developers because of some of the benefits they offer over RESTful APIs. One of the biggest benefits is that GraphQL allows for smarter and more precise querying which is especially useful when working with large APIs that return a lot of data. GraphQL enables users to specify exactly what data they get back in their response—nothing more, and nothing less, and it allows querying for multiple fields in a single request.

GraphQL can provide some significant querying efficiencies as compared to REST. Let's look at a specific example: If you wanted to use the Spotify REST API to get a list of all of the titles of all of the tracks of all of the albums by a particular artist, you would need to make three queries. You would need one query to find the artist ID, another to find all of the albums, and another to find all of the tracks on each album. If you were using the Spotify GraphQL API, you could access all of that data with a single query.

Postman now supports sending GraphQL queries in the request body, GraphQL variables, and GraphQL query auto-completion. Additionally, GraphQL support paired with our recent release of schema support and building APIs directly in Postman means users can now create and store GraphQL schemas directly in Postman itself.