"APIs 101"

You can add a URL as a variable at the collection or environment level in Postman. Here's how: Add the variable, set the URL as its value, and then reference it in your requests using double curly braces. Check out these Postman documentation pages for details:

Adding environment variables

Using variables

You can automate running requests in Postman using the Collection Runner. Check out our page on reusing the Collection Runner.

You can integrate your Postman Collection with GitHub and GitLab. Check out these Postman documentation pages for details:

GitHub integration

Gitlab integration

You can send some API requests just by entering the URL into your browser address bar. You can also use Postman on the Web (currently in beta).

If you want to control the execution of requests using scripts in Postman, you can do that by using the Collection Runner.

Yes. You can beautify JSON in Postman using the button at the top right of the body editor area. Your JSON response data should be automatically formatted if the request headers are correctly configured; however, you can also choose JSON from the drop-down list in the response body display.

Postman Visualizer should work on both dark and light mode, but you may need to add some styling to render the background dark and the text white. Switching to the light theme first might help.

Postman does not impose a hard limit on response size and can receive up to 100MB size without any issues. Regarding the limit defined by the API itself, that information is specified by the provider in their documentation.

You don't need to create Postman Collections, but they often come in handy and help you simplify certain activities. You can use collections to organize your requests and to group them for testing. Collections also provide access to additional Postman utilities such as auto-generated documentation, automation via the Collection Runner, mock data, monitoring, and more.

Yes, you can set it up at the collection level, then select "Inherit auth from parent" in each request.

There's a number of different ways that APIs handle data storage. This demo API from the “APIs 101” webinar uses a lightweight database called lowdb, but you will find many different data modeling and storage setups in different APIs. Some store encrypted data using an encryption algorithm, while others store it as a simple text.

Yes. You can export your collections in the Postman Collection format (JSON). Learn more about importing and exporting data with Postman.

Yes. Postman allows you to integrate with many popular applications. You can use Newman, which is a command-line collection runner for Postman. Newman is built with extensibility in mind so that you can easily integrate it with your continuous integration servers and build systems.
You can also use Postman integrations, which allow you to automate sharing data and functionality between Postman and other tools you might be using for your API development. Available integrations include Slack, GitHub, Datadog, OpenAPI, Microsoft Teams, and more.

If you're building an API for public use, you can generate docs automatically from Postman. We have a step-by-step tutorial for documenting your API which encourage you to check out.