In Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), testing is an essential phase and it can be performed manually or with the help of tools and scripts to automate this effort. As a developer, I came across a tool called Postman some time back which could cater to all my testing needs and is still very effective. As the product developed over time, I found it to be heavy and complicated, which gave me a reason to look out for alternatives.
A few years back I also happened to come across a free and lightweight code editor called Visual Studio Code (VS Code) which runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. In the Stack Overflow 2021 Developer Survey, VS Code was ranked the most popular code editor. It is also lightweight. In my opinion, one of the major reasons for its popularity is the extensions marketplace. I generally run multiple tools simultaneously such as code editors, a reverse proxy, 42Gears based web apps and so on where machine resource utilization becomes the biggest concern. Few months back, I found an extension called REST Client which was popular in terms of rating and downloads. In this blog, we’ll explain how to install and use this extension.
Let’s get started!
Installation
After installing the VS Code, launch it and head over to the Extensions Marketplace. Search for Rest Client extension and install it.
Usage
Create a file with extension http as this extension searches for files with this extension.
Ex: test.http
Create a request that includes the request method, headers, and body.
To execute the request, click on the Send Request hyperlink which appears on top of the request.
Multiple requests can be saved in a single file with the help of three of more # as a delimiter.
The response to the request will appear in a new tab.
Conclusion
This blog introduces and briefly explores the REST Client extension in VS Code which is lightweight and suitable for API testing. Since many developers use VS Code as a development IDE, this extension is worth a shot.
Extension Links
- VS Code Extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client
- GitHub Page https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient