7 Amazing API Tools You Need To Try

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Before becoming a systems architect working with unicorns, I made a mistake that cost my team three days of debugging.

I hardly left the office for 48 hours, and that experience taught me a valuable lesson.

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I thought I knew everything about HTTP requests. Having used curl for years, writing APIs, and building integrations, I felt confident.

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Then came the incident

Our back-office application was failing, and we couldn’t help with burning customer requests. I did what I always done when I had to debug something quickly - I disabled security by removing the API authentication key so my requests would go through curl without the hassle of providing them every time.

And then, I pushed my changes to production.

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This experience taught me that I need better tools, not shortcuts.

While curl remains an essential part of any developer’s toolkit (celebrating its 27th birthday this year! - which I hope it survives), modern alternatives have emerged that make API testing both safer and more efficient, especially when it comes to local tooling on desktop machines.

Take xh, for example - a Rust-based drop-in replacement for curl that simplifies complex requests. Instead of wrestling with curl’s syntax and manually formatting JSON, xh automatically detects request methods and presents beautifully formatted responses.

Want to send a POST request with data? Just type xh post path key=value - it’s that intuitive. It works the same with delete, put and all other methods.

Oh yea, and you get the syntax highlighting just like using jq (without the amazing JQ query features of course).

At some point, I started using HTTPie. The well known CLI / Interface that makes requests nicer and easier. Some would claim it is the spiritual father xh drew it’s style from.

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​Also, as an interesting side story - HTTPie lost more than 50K Github stars by accidentally making the repo private for just 1 minute.

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But, while HTTPie is great and all I’ve seen some complaints on performance (not verified), and didn’t cover all the curl features, it’s also written in Python (I’m joking… relax).

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Then, I found Curlie​

“The power of curl, the ease of use of httpie.”

And my god, it delivered, for me, it was like finding XH on steroids - wraps around curl features, great syntax, highlights the code, written in Go. I mean, I’m sold!

Curlie does it all and I’m using it daily.

However… when you need some real power, like collections, cookies, duplicating requests and using them in the context of a project, you need postman.

Or do you?

Imagine having Postman’s power right in your terminal - complete with collections, environment variables, and a responsive interface. You can save requests, organize them in collections, and use variables for testing, all while staying in your development environment.

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Meet Posting​

An open source, beautiful TUI. “The API client that lives in your terminal.” It has its own motions, beautiful design, with UX and the user in mind throughout. I’ve been enjoying posting for a while and I highly recommend you do too!

These tools work offline, integrate with version control, and maintain the speed of command-line utilities while adding crucial features for serious API testing.

Whether you’re building microservices or debugging integrations, this new generation of tools helps prevent mistakes while actually speeding up your workflow, be smart, don’t me like me :)

The lesson I learned from that production incident changed how I approach tooling and workflow forever. While I’d admit, sometime ricing is done for the sake of ricing, in this instance, improving your tooling, removes friction that makes sure you don’t have a reason to deviate from the path. At least that’s how I look at things.

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Thank you for reading.
Feel free to reply directly with any question or feedback.
Have a great weekend!