When creating APIs it is important to test if they work as intended. The easiest way to do this is to send a request and check the API's response.
Normally, you would send a request using the browser or the command line. But there's a tool we can use that's made especially for these testing purposes:
{% hyf-youtube src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1jU-kivApg" %}
Postman offers an intuitive graphical user interface that will help us visualize API requests and the responses we get.
You can install Postman by following these steps.
As you can see in the image below, when you enter a request in Postman and click the Send button, the server receives your request and returns a response that Postman then displays in the interface.
Watch the following video to learn about how to start sending your first requests with Postman:
{% hyf-youtube src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKalL1rVDOE" %}
If you just want to try postman out a bit, you can query any open API (you can search through some open ones here, or you can use the following module JSON Server. This NPM module starts a RESTful API without you having to write a single line of code.