Your Private API Network
You can share the APIs that your team uses internally to the Private API Network. Your team can learn about and access these APIs and start using them right away.
To add an API to your team's Private API Network, it must be in the API Builder. You can only add APIs, not collections, to the Private API Network.
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Adding your APIs
You can only add an API to the network if you have edit access to the API, and your team members have permission to view or edit the API. Learn more about roles and permissions.
To add an API to your team's Private API Network from Postman, sign in and select Private API Network in the left navigation bar.
The default view is your team's Private API Network. To add an API to your team's Private API Network, in the left navigation bar, select Add APIs.
Select one or more APIs you want to add to the network at one time. Create a folder to add the APIs to, if required. Select Add API.
The APIs that you add to the Private API Network reflect the latest state of the API in your team workspace. In other words, changes made to the API in the workspace will be reflected in the network in real time.
The API will immediately be visible in your team's Private API Network. From the listing, you can edit the network listing or remove the API from the network.
You can also add an API to your team's Private API Network from the API Builder via APIs in the left navigation bar. Select an API to see a high-level description on the Overview tab. Select Add API to Private API Network in the upper right corner of the overview page.
Learn more about editing and versioning APIs.
Security
Private APIs are only visible to logged in users who are a part of your Postman team. They are not discoverable or accessible to anyone who is not a part of your team.
Guidelines
To add an API to the network, you must have edit access to the API and the API must be in a team or public workspace. You cannot add an API to the private network unless all team members have at least view access to the API. Learn more about team roles and permissions.
Features of Private API Network
The Private API Network provides a central directory of all internal APIs in your organization, that teams can check before engineering their own solutions.
The following lists the key features of the Private API Network that help make discovering Private APIs easier:
Folder organization
You can create new folders from the Private API Network view. Select Create Folder from the left navigation bar to create a new folder. Give it a name and summary (supports Markdown). Your new folder will now be created in the Private API Network.
From the overview page, select Create Folder on the right to create a new folder. You can also create sub folders when you are inside a folder with the Create folder button.
Once you've created the folder, you can add APIs to get started. Make your API selection from the dropdown under Select APIs to add them to your team's Private API Network. You can select as many APIs you want to add to the Private API Network at one time. Select Add API.
All versions that are visible to consumers will be available on the Private API Network. Read more about API versioning.
Select 
next to the API you would like to edit from the network and select Edit API listing. You can update the API summary, and modify the folder to which the API should be added. Select Update when the changes are done.
You can also remove the added APIs from your Private API Network. Select next to the API you would like to remove from network. Once you select Remove, your team members will also lose access to the API via the network.
The sidebar navigation displays the folder structure for your Private API Network. You can also drag and drop the APIs and subfolders to different folders. Furthermore, you can add Markdown-supported descriptions to folders to explain about the APIs within the folders, if required.
You can use the search box to search across folders, subfolders, and APIs in your Private API Network.
API overview page
The API overview page provides all the relevant information about an API to enable users to make a choice about using the API. This also provides information on who published this API, along with other editors of the API, to whom you can reach out using the comments in Postman.
Clicking on an API takes you to the API details where you will find more information about the API — API description, Markdown summary, API versions, the workspace where the API currently exists, API editors, and API reports. You can watch or unwatch an API at any time.
API versions
You can publish specific versions of your APIs to the Private API Network which helps API consumers understand which versions are ready for consumption and which versions are still being worked upon. Only the versions of your API that are intended for use by consumers are visible on the Private API Network.
From the API builder, you can create a new version of the existing API. Select on the right near the Share button and select Create version. You can unselect the checkbox to hide the version or make it unavailable to the consumers.
You can always decide the visibility of API versions visible to the consumers. To edit an API version, select the version in the Overview tab, then select > Edit in the upper right. You can select the checkbox to make that particular version available to the consumers. Select Save Changes when done.
When you publish the versions of your APIs to your Private API Network, only the versions visible to the consumers will get published, and you can resume your work-in-progress API versions anytime.
To know more about visibility of API versions, see Versioning APIs.
Easy filtering
You can filter the APIs in your Private API Network based on name using the search box. Use the Added by menu to filter based on the person who added the API. Use the Sort by option to sort the APIs based on name and recently added.
You can also filter the folders, subfolders, and APIs based on name and recently added.
API landscape governance
The report feature makes it easier to govern your internal API landscape through deeper insights into APIs in your Private API Network.
Navigate to your API and select Reports to the right of the API.
The API report provides the following information:
- API name is the name of the API published to the Private API Network
- API created by is the name of person who created the API
- API created on is the date when the API was created
- Number of API requests is the total number of API requests sent over a period of time
- Failed test runs is the number of failed test runs over a time frame
- Average response size is the average response size in bytes for the requests over a time period
- Average response time is the average response time in milliseconds for requests over a time frame
- API response codes is a graph showing different response codes for API requests plotted vs the number of API requests
GitHub import
You can make all your existing APIs discoverable on the Private API Network when you import from GitHub. When you create an API, switch over to the Import tab to view the options to import from a code repository.
To import from Github, see Importing via GitHub repositories.
Discovering and consuming private APIs
The Private API Network is a good place to learn about APIs shared within your team. You can browse private APIs in the Private API Network under your team name, or explore public APIs in the public API network.
Private APIs are only visible to logged in users who are a part of your Postman team.
Under your team name, you can browse a directory of APIs shared within your team. Select an API to see a high-level description.
To review version-level details, select > on the right of the API version. You can review information about the API and the description. You can edit the schema or make changes to the API directly. You can view editors who have worked on the API and the workspace it currently exists in.
Add API to Private API Network will display on the right if you haven't added the API to the private network.
Select Watch to start watching the API. To learn more about watch notifications, see Watching an API.
Next steps
Last modified: 2021/11/30