At a conference a few days ago, I put up a slide with a few of my favourite tools on it. I got some brilliant additional recommendations in return from twitter so I thought I’d collect them all in one place in case anyone is interested – all these tools are excellent for anyone working APIs (so that’s everyone!). First, my original slide:

The starter set of tools looked like this:

• cURL is the swiss-army command-line knife for all HTTP requests, and much, much more. It’s kind of arcane but powerful and it’s my tool of choice.
• jq is a brilliant command-line tool for handling JSON; I use it with curl and this talk was about CouchDB which speaks JSON for its data format so I had to mention it here!
• http-console is a cross-platform interactive HTTP prompt, I like it and use it a lot with CouchDB particularly.
• HTTPie is more like curl but humane and with gorgeous colourful output that makes everything easier to read! This should be my favourite but I have the muscle memory for curl.
• Postman is a cross-platform friendly graphical interface for making and inspecting HTTP requests. I usually recommend this to anyone who find this a more approachable way to use a computer than from the commandline. It’s a very, very good tool and works on all platforms.

Additional Suggestions

A bunch of really interesting tools went past on twitter so I’m adding them here in case anyone wants to check them out:

• A popular (but not free) option for Mac users looking for a good GUI tool is Paw – suggested by @freekmurze and seconded by @akrabat.
• There were a lot of recommendations for Insomnia, an open source graphical HTTP client. Thanks to @heiglandreas, @zot24 and @wijzijnVannut for that one.
• http-prompt is HTTPie (mentioned above) plus an interactive prompt which sounds great – suggestion comes from @codeheaps

What did we miss? Do you love or hate any of these tools? Answers in the comments please, I think it’s great to be sharing our experiences of the apps we’re using and what works for each of us!