HowTo Video Tutorial Script (806 words)

-Joyce Lin: Hi, in this video we’ll take a look at how you can create a template or share your APIs publicly in Postman. For this video you should already know about the basics of Postman like making collections and writing documentation. I’ll drop the links in the description below if you want to check that out first.

We’ll learn about the Postman API Network and what a template is in Postman. We’ll learn about these special types of collections, how you can use them and create your own. Let’s get started in the Postman app. Make sure you have a Postman account and you’re logged in.

In the top left click on the orange ‘’New’ button and we’ll see the last two tabs called ‘Templates’ and ‘API Network’. Let’s start with the API Network. On the left side of this module you can see a list of categories and at the top there’s a search field.

If your team has a public API like PayPal or Github you can share your API documentation in the Postman API Network. Developers who are looking for a particular API can search for it here, import your Postman collection into their instance a Postman, and get a jumpstart with using your API right away.

That’s pretty straightforward, let’s move on. Back to the New button tab over to Templates. Let’s say you’re a development and operations engineer and you want to learn something new in Postman. Let’s look under the DevOps category.

Here’s the template called AWS IAM MFA Audit that’s a lot of letters but I know that my team uses Amazon Web Services and we’re supposed to require multi-factor authentication. It looks like there’s three required inputs that I’ll need in order to use this template and it’s probably something that my team can use, let’s click Use this template.

Now we’ve imported the template into our instance a Postman you can see the collection here in our sidebar, this template happened to have an environment as well and we can see it here in this drop-down. At this point we can edit our environment to add our AWS access

credentials and a slack webhook to pipe our audit results into slack. Once we set it up we can run this collection manually with the collection runner or schedule it to run regularly as a Postman monitor.This is one type of template it’s like a script that automates a series of tasks. Alright, let’s try a different scenario.

Let’s say you’re a QA engineer and you use Postman to test your APIs. Let’s look under the test automation category, here is a template called ‘Intro to writing tests –  with examples’. There’s examples of tests that I can use to automate my testing process quick tips, resources and it doesn’t look like there’s any inputs required for me. Perfect! Let’s click to use this template.

Once again we can see our imported collection in the sidebar. This particular template doesn’t have an environment. I can expand these folders, poke around, walkthrough examples of API tests integration tests, read the descriptions and begin interacting with these examples in the Postman app.

This type of template is different than the first one we looked at. This one isn’t like a utility, this one demonstrates examples of better practices and workflows. I can see how somebody else has done something in Postman and then pick and choose what I’d like to adapt for my own team.

There’s a bunch of other types of templates whether you’re teaching someone how to use a particular API or just showing someone how they can do something cool. There’s a bunch of templates you can look at and pull into your instance to Postman.

If you’re feeling particularly generous pay it forward and share your own collections with the rest of the community as a template. And that’s it, we learned about the Postman API Network it’s a good way to find and share public APIs this makes it easy to show others how to use your API and on the flip side you can pull API documentation in Postman and begin interacting with APIs more quickly.

We learned about templates in Postman. These are collections that might automate tedious tasks by chaining together requests, these are like scripts that can be run on demand or schedule to run regularly on a Postman monitor.

There’s also templates that demonstrate examples of typical workflows like for getting started, testing or other best practices before working with APIs. Whether or not you’re teaching others how to use an API or learning how to use specific API yourself with over 6 million people using Postman around the world we think you’ll find some pretty neat stuff. You’re gonna like the way your API looks, we guarantee it.