Design and build your APIs in Postman

Postman offers a variety of ways to design and develop your APIs. Use Postman Collections to add properties to your HTTP requests that define parameters, headers, and bodies. You can define your API's structure with Spec Hub in an API specification, and generate a collection from the specification to share with your consumers. Use the API Builder to define your API's structure in an API definition, linking Postman elements that help you design and test your API. You can also create a mock server that simulates your API's requests and responses before it's production ready.

Design APIs with collections

Types in collections is available with Postman Professional and Enterprise plans.

With types in collections, you can design and test your APIs with the Postman Collection format. Define properties, such as type and possible values, for your request parameters, headers, and bodies in an HTTP collection. Postman then validates your requests using the defined properties and identifies possible issues. Properties appear in the collection's documentation.

Share collections with types turned on to help your team and API consumers send valid API requests, so they get successful responses instead of errors.

You can generate an OpenAPI 3.0 specification from an HTTP collection. Postman automatically creates a specification with paths, components, and more based on the collection. You can keep the specification in sync with your latest changes to the collection.

Learn more at Design your APIs with Postman Collections.

Design APIs with specifications

Spec Hub is available with Postman Enterprise plans.

With Spec Hub, you can design your API's structure in an OpenAPI 3.0 or AsyncAPI 2.0 specification. Postman identifies syntax errors as you edit your API specification. You can also view a live preview of the documentation that's generated from the API specification in the right sidebar.

You can generate an HTTP collection from an API specification, turning on types for the collection. Postman automatically creates a collection with folders, requests, and response examples based on the specification. If the collection was generated from an OpenAPI 3.0 specification, you can keep the collection in sync with your latest changes to the specification.

Learn more at Design API specifications in Postman.

Develop APIs with the API Builder

You can use the API Builder to design your API's structure in an API definition. Build out your API by connecting various Postman elements, such as collections, documentation, and tests. Postman validates requests in linked collections using your API definition. Postman also identifies syntax errors as you edit your API definition. You can also use Git-based version control for developing and managing changes to your API, such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps.

Integrate Postman with an API gateway to track your API deployment status and history, such as Amazon API Gateway, Apigee X, and Azure API Management. You can also integrate your API with observability tools to view application performance management (APM) metrics from New Relic or Datadog inside Postman.

Learn more at Develop APIs with the API Builder in Postman.

Configure and use a Postman mock server

Use a mock server to simulate your API's endpoints without having to configure a real API server. Make calls to the mock server that return responses to test your API or test new functionality before it's production ready. By default, mock servers return status responses defined in saved examples, but you can also configure a mock server to generate dynamic responses.

Learn more at Simulate your API in Postman with a mock server.