Postman CLI overview

The Postman CLI (postman) is Postman’s official, signed command-line tool for running and managing collections, specifications, mocks, and other Postman elements from your terminal, coding agents, or CI/CD pipeline.

Install

npm install -g postman-cli

For update, uninstall, and troubleshooting instructions, see Install the Postman CLI.

Quickstart

1. Sign in, or set up a project without an account:

   postman login

   or

   postman init

2. Run a collection:

   postman collection run <path-or-id>

3. Lint an API specification against your team’s governance rules:

   postman spec lint <path-or-id>

4. Get machine-readable output for a script or an agent:

   postman workspace list --json

What you can do

Setup and account

• Set up an AI-ready API project in a repository (postman init).
• Authenticate with Postman from the command line (postman login).
• Run basic CLI commands to get help and version information.
• List the teams in your organization (postman team).

Workspace elements

• Validate, synchronize, and push local Postman elements to workspaces in the Postman Cloud (postman workspace).
• Run and manage collections with extensive configuration options and built-in reporters (postman collection).
• Work with environments locally or in the cloud (postman environment).
• Validate global variables (postman globals).
• Check API specifications against your team’s governance rules (postman spec).
• Manage workspace dependencies to reuse collections, environments, and mocks from other workspaces (postman dependency).
• Create and manage datasets with reusable data sources, SQL queries, and saved views (postman dataset).
• Test individual HTTP requests directly from the command line (postman request).
• Search for Postman elements such as requests, collections, workspaces, flows, mocks, environments, and specifications (postman search).

Mocks, tests, and monitoring

• Start mock servers to simulate API behavior for testing and development (postman mock).
• Run simulations that serve several mock servers behind one address, to test how your service responds to disruptions and performance constraints (postman simulation).
• Run monitors and performance tests to check your API’s health and performance, and catch regressions (postman monitor, postman performance).
• Start monitoring runners in your internal network to monitor APIs with private endpoints (postman runner).
• Initialize application configuration and run application tests with network capture and Application Inventory reporting (postman app).

Automation and generation

• Deploy and trigger Postman Flows for API workflow automation (postman flows).
• Create, manage, and forward webhooks for event-driven integrations and local development (postman webhook).
• Generate and manage client SDKs from your Postman Collections and API specifications (postman sdk).

AI and agents

• Give coding agents what they need to generate accurate code for API discovery, code generation, and maintenance tasks (postman describe).
• Ask your team’s Context Graph natural-language questions about your APIs and their dependencies (postman context-graph).
• Check and update the agent skills installed in a repository (postman skills).

Legacy (Postman v11)

• Publish API versions in the Postman v11 API Builder from the command line (postman api publish).

For agents and CI

The Postman CLI supports non-interactive use, machine-readable --json output on many commands, and event reporting you can turn off with --no-report-events. For agent-specific context and code generation, see postman describe.

Next steps

• Install the Postman CLI.
• Browse commands and global options for a complete reference.
• Explore the specific command pages that match your workflow using the navigation on the left.