Show HN: Yapi – FOSS terminal API client for power users

2 days ago (yapi.run)

I shared a previous version of yapi a few months ago in the comments section of a post talking about the insanity of Postman being 'down'. yapi has developed into a more mature project since then!

https://github.com/jamierpond/yapi

Still very early, but it makes me much more productive vs Postman, Bruno, Insomnia, etc.

If youre a nvim/tmux culture human, you might like this!

17 comments

jamiepond

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deltaknight  1 day ago

This looks super cool, I’ve played around with making custom API clients/executers in multiple teams now and am glad to see something that I might actually use instead of re-rolling my own each time.

One thing I’ve previously found very useful is the ability to select multiple ‘environments’ at once (I’ve previously split this in to e.g. environment+session or environment+user before). The ability to merge a set of variables together lets you define variables for _where_ I’m calling (local, staging, etc), but also who/what I’m calling (specific users, types of profiles/packages (how does this api behave if I switch between a free vs paid licence), etc).

Also echoing another comment, the blog linked gives me a 404 page now. Additionally, the GitHub for this projects seems have a ton of blank issues saying “help yapi made me too productive”? Rather odd, I probably won’t be running this project directly anytime soon…

dhruv3006  2 days ago

Great to see this space so active !

Building something similar : https://voiden.md

  • jamiepond  2 days ago

    This is a really interesting approach! How did you end up deciding on executable markdown as opposed to other approaches?

    • dhruv3006  1 day ago

      well - the point is. that we wanted to be standards compliant - and want to use existing technologies without actually reiventing a new standard or a proprietary format. (like some of the other api clients took).

      and moreover we had this fundamental idea that documentation and testing should be in a single source of truth to avoid documentation drift (not just the spec drift).

      And hence we came up with the idea of using markdown as the baseline and doing everything around it.

      1 reply →

mh9r  20 hours ago

I love file-based API clients. I think it’s only time to define a standard file format that all or most IDEs, editors and clients support. Fragmentation between IntelliJ, VSCode and any other tool makes the approach less useful as it could be.