Organize and automate API requests in Postman Collections

Postman Collections are portable sets of API requests that you can reuse, automate, and share with others. You can use a collection to save important details for each API request, such as the authorization type, parameters and headers, request bodies, scripts and variables, and documentation.

Get started with collections

Create a collection to save API requests and organize them into folders. You can create a collection from scratch or by using one of Postman’s predefined templates. Collections can contain HTTP requests or requests that use other protocols, such as GraphQL or gRPC.

Once you’ve created a collection, you can invite other team members to collaborate on it, or you can share it with the world. Learn more about creating and managing request collections in Postman.

Run and automate collections

Use the Collection Runner to send some or all of the API requests in a collection in the sequence you specify. Run a collection to test your API’s functionality or to replicate user workflows. You can run collections manually, on a schedule, or from a webhook. Learn more about testing your API functionality

Test your API’s performance

You can use the Collection Runner to test the performance of your API with the same collections and requests you use for functional API tests. Simulate real-world user traffic with virtual users so you can observe how your API behaves under load. Learn more about simulating user traffic to test your API performance.

Use collections in API development workflows

You can use Postman Collections throughout your API development, testing, and publishing workflows:

• View and generate API documentation from collections, and publish your documentation on the web.
• Create a Postman Monitor with a collection to continuously check the health of your API and get alerts when failures occur.
• Set up a mock server with a collection to simulate the behavior of a real server for API development and testing purposes.
• Generate collections from API specifications using Spec Hub.
• Add more details to request parameters, headers, and bodies with types in a collection. Define types such as data type, format, and possible values. This enables you to design your API using a collection.

Learn about a collection’s elements and activity

Collaborators can view a summary of a collection’s purpose, recent activity, and related elements on the collection’s Overview tab. It provides a snapshot of the collection’s description, changelog, and associated environments, monitors, and mocks.

About the collection format

Postman Collections are based on the open source collection format. The collection format is portable and defines a structure for organizing API requests and modeling API workflows. The format is machine and human readable, and it can be used to generate client and server SDKs, documentation, and mock servers.

To learn more, see the Postman Collection schema documentation.