Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

Re:Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to... by mch82 on Friday October 21, 2022 @09:59AM (#33288055)

Cool project! A true, open source alternative to Postman will be valuable. It seems like you’ve got the major elements in place.

Unsolicited UX notes…

I read Hacker News on mobile, so tried the app on mobile and ran into some challenges. In order to save space, eliminate the right click, and work on mobile please consider changing:

    You can right click here to create a new request or a new folder

To the following (illustrated using pseudo markdown):

    [Create request] or [Create a folder]

It would also be helpful to replace the GitHub star link with a link to your README. GitHub star links are problematic because they require a login that adds friction that prevents people from getting to your README page. People will login if they decide to star the project, but they might never get to your GitHub if they don’t have time to login or can’t easily login on the device where they’re reading.

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Re:Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to... by kermire on Friday October 21, 2022 @10:08AM (#33288151)

Thank you. The UI is not currently built with mobile in mind. I have been thinking of implementing a responsive layout but haven't had the time to do it.

I did not know about the GitHub star login thing. Will try to rectify it when I can. Thanks for all your UX notes.

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Re:Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to... by djbusby on Friday October 21, 2022 @02:33PM (#33291469)

Github Star link looks fixed.

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Re:Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to... by Havoc on Friday October 21, 2022 @11:44AM (#33289255)

There is also hopscotch - unsure about licensing but it is self hostable

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Re:Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to... by and0 on Friday October 21, 2022 @01:55PM (#33291008)

I dug into hoppscotch since my org balked at Postman enterprise costs, but was disappointed. It is open source and can run locally, but it still only talks to their cloud that stores your collections as a logged-in user (or session storage if you're offline). It's definitely a fledgeling commercial project, not a true open-source alternative, though you could fork it easily enough probably.

I had been hoping to keep all of our APIs centralized in git and run the local (or cloud for our ENVs) from that repo, but it doesn't read any query/API/collection defs from file.

(Not to come off as demanding of OSS, it's a wonderful product, but unfortunately you have to dig deep to figure out the limitations.)

EDIT: Also, what I'd go with now is Thunder client for VS code leveraging API defs stored within each repo + the localized vars such as auth info.

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Re:Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to... by Havoc on Friday October 21, 2022 @02:06PM (#33291135)

I tried Thunder too but their "please log in" popup is quite annoying. Wasn't aware it can leverage repo contents though - that seems like a killer feature.

> fledgeling commercial project, not a true open-source alternative

Yeah most of the self-host stuff tends to be like that unfortunately. Understandable but not ideal.

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Re:Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to... by markcollin on Saturday October 22, 2022 @05:36AM (#33296795)

You should checkout https://www.github.com/usebruno/bruno they have collections that run on top of a folder that can be synced with git

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