Using Postman Environment Variables to Help Make Ease of API Development

When developing or testing APIs, Postman makes the job simple for us. There are many tools available that we can use to do our development or testing with ease. What I found to be most beneficial are environment variables. If you are working with many different environments, you may set up each with any authorization tokens, urls, or any other variables you find necessary to set. After setting up your variables and building your request, all that’s left is to select your environment and make your call.

To get started, click on the gear icon on the Postman dashboard shown below to start adding environment variables.

Once you have your environment up you can start adding your variables. I have added some as an example below.

Organization of your request collections can also be handy. By doing so, you can categorize all of your requests so that you can find them easier and then quickly make your call. These collections can additionally be shared with and edited by your development team to aid in collaboration. Your requests can comprise of the environment variables that you now have in place so that you can conveniently work in multiple environments. Below, I have shown a sample request.

Postman has saved me a considerable amount of time as well as headaches when I am developing; it makes the process much easier to pass on my collections to other developers that need to make the same API requests. I would highly suggest taking an instant to set up these tools in order to take full advantage of the Postman capabilities.