Capture API Calls from a website in Postman
Introduction
Postman is a powerful tool for testing and debugging APIs. One of its key features is the ability to capture API calls made by a website, allowing developers to better understand how the website interacts with APIs. In this page, we will walk through the process of setting up Postman Interceptor and capturing API calls from a website.
This guide assumes that Postman is already installed on your system. If not, please download and install it from this link. Please note that Postman Web App cannot be used for this purpose.
Setup
Step 1
The first step is to install the Postman Interceptor extension in Chrome from this link. This extension allows Postman to intercept API calls made by a website and display them in the Postman app.
Step 2
Next, open the Postman app and click on Capture request in the bottom right of the footer. This will open a new Capture requests tab.
Step 3
On the Capture requests window, select the Via Interceptor tab.
Step 4
Next, select Install Interceptor Bridge to download the Bridge.
Step 5
After the Bridge is successfully installed, confirm that Interceptor is ready to use by checking that the Connected status in the upper right is green.
Usage
Step 1
First, in the Postman app, create a new collection.
Step 2
Next, go to the Via Interceptor tab of the Capture requests window.
Step 3
Select the newly created collection from the list under Save requests to a collection.
Step 4
Open the target website in Chrome.
Step 5
Click on Start Capture in Postman.
Step 6
Refresh the website or perform the actions that trigger API calls and check if the calls are being listed in Postman. You can click on each API call to see more details about the request and response, including the headers, body, and status code.
Step 7
After new calls have stopped occurring, click on Stop to stop the Interceptor session.
Step 8
A debug session summary will be shown along with all the captured requests.
Step 9
Finally, check if all the calls are saved successfully in the selected collection.
Conclusion
Capturing API calls from a website using Postman Interceptor is a powerful way to gain insight into how the website interacts with APIs. By following the steps outlined in this page, we can easily capture API calls and use them in Postman to test and debug our APIs.
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