Viewing documentation

You can view and comment on private documentation shared with you. Documentation for each collection is published privately by default—you can make documentation visible within a team workspace by sharing the collection. You can optionally choose to publish documentation, in which case anyone with the link can view it.

If you have edit access to a collection, you can edit its documentation while viewing it in the web browser.

Contents

• Viewing private documentation
  • Commenting on documentation
• Viewing public documentation
  • Linking to documentation
• Next steps

Viewing private documentation

You can view documentation for any collection that has been shared with you. You must be logged in to your Postman account to view private documentation.

Postman Team, Business, and Enterprise teammates with view permissions can comment on documentation, while teammates with edit permissions can write, revise, and update it.

To view the documentation:

1. Select the collection
2. In the bottom right, select View complete collection documentation.

You will also see detail on each request, including sample code in various client languages, required authorization type, an indicator of the method, the URL, description, headers, request and response structures, and examples. Documentation authors can optionally include other details.

The private URL is only accessible to Postman users logged in with appropriate permissions. To make documentation viewable publicly, you can publish it.

You can alternatively access documentation by visiting your user profile in the browser, choosing Collections, and clicking the name of a collection.

If the documentation you are viewing has multiple release tags published, you can select a specific release to view.

Commenting on documentation

You can view and post comments on your API documentation to collaborate with teammates. When you view the documentation for a collection, you will see any existing comments on it.

You can add a comment to join in the discussion. Comments on documentation reflect comments on the corresponding collection.

You can only comment on private documentation.

Viewing public documentation

You can access public documentation through a URL in your web browser. Postman generates the URL when the documentation is published—the URL is also accessible from the web dashboard.

When you view public documentation, you will see any shared environments, the layout, and the sample code language at the top. You can expand the menu of any of these details to change them.

For each request, you will see a description of the request, the method and URL, the required authorization type, and any headers or parameters. On the right, you will see example client code snippets for the request, together with example response bodies and headers in the language selected.

Postman currently supports various programming languages and frameworks to customize your code snippets. Don't see your language of choice, or is there a setting missing that you'd find useful? Select Contribute on GitHub under the settings icon to contribute to the open source project.

Linking to documentation

You can link to headings within your generated documentation, including the introduction, requests, folders, and responses.

The links are generated from your documentation using IDs. To find a link, click the relevant section in the left sidebar and you'll see it in your browser address bar (or right-click and copy the link). You can then link directly to doc page sections using this link.

Next steps

Learn more about collaborating with your team in Postman.