Manage gRPC APIs using Postman

gRPC is a schema-driven Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework often used to enable inter-service communication. Being RPC-based, it facilitates client-server communication over a function call instead of an HTTP call. gRPC has gained significant popularity because of its easier abstraction than HTTP, support across multiple languages, and high performance.

gRPC uses protobuf (protocol buffers) as the Interface Definition Language (IDL) to define the API interface (service definition) which serves as a contract between the client and the server specifying the supported services and methods.

Developing gRPC APIs with Postman

Postman has a client interface to work with gRPC services and the API Builder interface to create and manage your protobuf definitions. If you haven't already, download and install the Postman desktop app to get started.

Using a gRPC request, you can view supported services and methods (with a service definition), invoke the method of your interest, send a message payload, view the response from the server, and save example responses, all without entering commands in the terminal or writing any code. You can save these requests into a collection to reuse them later, share them with your teammates, or publish them to the community on Postman's public API network.

You can use the Postman API Builder to create the service definition using protobuf IDL and keep it as a single source of truth for your API project.

Next steps

To get started with gRPC, see the following topics:

• Using the gRPC request interface
• Invoking your first gRPC request
• Working with service definitions