Postman is a complete API development environment that helps you manage your APIs in every stage of development from designing and testing, to publishing API documentation and monitoring. Postman started as a Chrome browser extension and quickly become one of the most used API tools by developers all over the world.
Postman is available as a native app (built on Electron) for all major operating systems including macOS, Linux, and Windows. Although it is possible to install and use Postman as a Chrome app, support for the Postman Chrome app is being deprecated.
This tutorial explains how to install Postman on Ubuntu 18.04. The same instructions apply for Ubuntu 16.04 and any Ubuntu-based distribution, including Linux Mint, Kubuntu, and Lubuntu.
Prerequisites
Before continuing with this tutorial, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges.
Installing Postman
The easiest way is to install Postman on Ubuntu 18.04 is by using the snappypackaging system.
Open your terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T
and install the Postman snap package, by typing:
sudo snap install postman
The download may take some time depending on the speed of your connection. Once installed, the following output will be displayed:
postman 6.7.1 from 'postman-inc' installed
Alternatively, you can install Postman using the Ubuntu Software Center. Simply search for Postman and click install:
Starting Postman
Now that Postman is installed on your Ubuntu system you can start it by clicking on the Postman icon (Activities -> Postman
):
When you start Postman for the first time, a window like the following will appear asking you to login or create a new account:
If you create an account, you will be able to organize your work in Workspaces, create backups, and sync your data across multiple devices. If you don’t want to log in simply click on “Skip signing in and take me straight to the app”.
To illustrate how Postman works, we will send a simple Get request to a hosted REST API and receive a JSON response containing users list.
On the “Untitled Request tab” enter https://reqres.in/api/users
, leave the request type as GET
and click on the SEND button. On success, the response will return a JSON object containing an array of users.
The Postman Learning Center should be a good starting point for learning how to create Postman workspaces, collections, environments and more.
Conclusion
You have successfully install Postman on your Ubuntu 18.04 machine. You can now explore your new API tool and start working on your projects.
If you have any question, please leave a comment below.