Now if all of these concepts are new to you do not worry all this is really going to focus on is configuring your environment. If you're going through this and you're not following along on Linux, you can also do the exact same thing on Mac or Windows. The commands that we're going to walk through today are specifically targeted to working with a Linux virtual box type of environment.

So right here I have a link to BlueMatador (link below) that has this very helpful guide on how to install Postman on your Linux machine. Now if you've never heard of Postman, what it is is a very helpful application that allows you to communicate with outside APIs. So an API is a service kind of like a website or server that you can communicate with, but instead of getting a web page back, you get data back.

This is a very helpful way that you can build out applications, and pass data back and forth then no matter what type of course that you're going through you can use Postman since it's not specific to a programming language or a framework or anything like that.

When I'm building out a flask API application, or a react application, or a Rails application I can use Postman for all of them because all it does is it all only cares about is the data request and so that's why it's really helpful and it's a tool I use pretty much on a daily basis because I do a lot of API development.

So with all that means that I will include a link to this BlueMatador post in your show notes and that is going to give you the set of commands you need in order to install this.

So the very first thing that I'm going to do is copy this first line. So we're going to end up copying each one of these will copy them one at a time so we can make sure that they all succeed, And I'm going to paste this in.

wget https://dl.pstmn.io/download/latest/linux64 -O postman.tar.gz

And remember in order to paste in Linux it's control + shift + N + V. So I'm going to run this and it's going to go out and it's going to get that Postman application and I'm going to let the video fast forward while that is occurring.

Okay looks like that installed properly. So now we are going to unpack it, so that's what we do when we run this sudo tar -xzf postman.tar.gz -C /opt command, it'll give us the raw data here and it's compressed so now we need to actually pack it with the command.

So let's switch back paste that in, and it's going to ask us for our password and then it's going to go and unpack that and install it on the system.

Now we want to remove that compressed version because we only care about the software itself so that's what this rm postman.tar.gz command does, so we're going to remove that.

And lastly, we are going to create a symlink right here. It's not really that important we understand everything that's going on here. This is just the steps that you can run in order to get this installed on your system. So I'm going to run sudo ln -s /opt/Postman/Postman /usr/bin/postman and it appears that that worked.

And now we have you scroll down a few more other commands and what these are going to allow you to do this allows you to call the Postman application directly from the system. So whenever you call the search trait here then you can call Postman, which is something that I find quite helpful. (you can read the description in the article for more details)

cat > ~/.local/share/applications/postman.desktop <<EOL
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Postman
Exec=postman
Icon=/opt/Postman/resources/app/assets/icon.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Development;
EOL

So I'm going to copy all of this at one time. And now let's paste this and hit enter, and it appears that all worked so I'm going to quit out of the terminal and then get back in, and let's come up here and see if we have access to Postman in our applications and there it is.

So if you click on that and if no errors pop up that means that everything should have installed properly. So it is loading right here inside of the virtual box window and so depending on what version that you have you may get a few different dialog boxes, I've noticed that Postman is updated quite regularly so even within the past few months I've noticed different dialog boxes come up.

I definitely recommend that you sign up it's completely free to use, so I'm going to first fill all of these fields in. Sign up and then that's going to go through the process of signing up and give you an account. And I believe that when you do that means that you can share your different workspaces across your computers.

Now we have the ability to start building some requests. So now that we have this I'm going to take a break here in the video and in the next one, I'm going to show you how to make some sample requests in Postman with a real API.

Resources

• Postman Installation Scripts