Insomnia REST client now requires an account(github.com) |
Insomnia REST client now requires an account(github.com) |
"2) Insomnia still has a local-only mode (Scratch Pad) that doesn't require any account, that anybody can use. A collection can be imported into Scratch Pad for API debugging purposes."
So, if I don't need or want any sharing and keep my collections in the file system, can I still use it without ever creating an account or not?
The 'UI' (which is really an editor/syntax highlighting for the .http files) version I believe is a paid feature on the IDEs, but the CLI one I believe you don't need to pay to use it.
Seems it has (accidentally) at least happen once before (https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/5559) so probably worth switching to a different client regardless if this time was on purpose or not.
open-source a tool
build userbase
VC funding
rugpull
repeat
Ps. I helped build it
* good old tools - curl, Emacs plugins (restclient.el is pretty nice), Vim plugins;
* and Postman/Insomnia alternatives - restfox.dev, hoppscotch.io and httpie.io (my personal preference so far) and I found this group to be the most volatile (I personally has moved from Postman to Insomnia).
Self-hosted and open source.
An update on Insomnia 8.x here:
* Insomnia can be used locally-only with Scratch Pad.
* Insomnia can be used with an account without sharing any data using Git Sync (the data is in your Git repository, wherever that is hosted).
* Insomnia can be used with an account and without Git Sync in a fully end-to-end encrypted way (E2EE). Nobody can read your data.
* Insomnia stores your account information in Auth0, which is ISO27001, SOC 2 Type II, ISO27018, HIPAA BAA, Gold CSA STAR, PCI and GDPR compliant.
* The data is not automatically migrated anywhere unless an account is created, as clearly explained in the onboarding that users have to approve in order to get access to the product.
* Insomnia can be used for Free with an account.
Unlike Postman, we are fully E2EE on every plan, local Scratch Pad is still there, Git is always an option when having an account.
On top of this, we have shipped today 100s of features for real time collaboration, unlimited collaborators in the Free plan when working on one project, organizations, RBAC, EE SSO, multi-client support for everyone, and so on [1]
Finally, here is a video that shows how to use Insomnia locally: https://www.loom.com/share/de7af6f9e06b4452a799a033604f9270?...
Trying to put some clarity in the noise. If you find any of these statements which is factually incorrect, please point them out.
When having a paid account, you mean.
- Enabling Git Sync which skips the cloud entirely and works with a 3rd party Git repository.
- Using Private Environments which are never synchronized in either Git or Insomnia Sync (cloud)
If you only have one collection, you can use Scratch Pad locally for that.
Reality is that Insomnia offers plenty of ways to still run locally, but now it does it in a sustainable way that allows us to improve the product even more.
I forgot to add that users can also create "Private Environments" which are always local and never synchronized with Insomnia Sync (in the cloud) or Git Sync.
For what it's worth, I first switched to Insomnia from Postman, years ago, when they pulled a similar stunt.
Rest assured, although I created an account earlier (to gain access to my collections which simply seemed to disappear overnight), I'll be switching away from your product, so don't count that account creation as a win in your metrics. Not impressed with how this has been handled at all. It seems there are very few trustworthy companies in tech anymore.
- Free and Opensource IDE for exploring and testing APIs
- It is lightweight with MIT license
- Bruno stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem
- Use git for collaboration
- No cloud sync. Fully offline.
PS: I am the creator of this project
starts as offline
vc funding
enables cloud sync for collaboration with teams
deprecates offline as scratchpad
deletes scratchpad
Its been like this for a decade now.
With Bruno the key insight was to store collections and requests as folders and files, and design a markup language that makes it easy to collaborate with your team. I wrote about this here: https://www.usebruno.com/blog/the-saas-dilemma
There is telemetry. And I didn't find opt in or even opt out code.
> lightweight
Could you quantify? I never saw a lightweight Electron app.
yes, its miniscule. one ping (and that too once in a day) that indicates that an anonymous user opened the app. No other usage details, micro interactions or anything else is tracked. Sure - in the future we will provide option to turn this off too.
> Could you quantify? I never saw a lightweight Electron app.
relatively, compared to the other electron monsters out there. You are definitely not going to native performance and fluidity, but it's a tradeoff that I made to support multiple os.
Also, currently Bruno is just me developing it for the last 2 years. Recently a community has formed around (nice to see) and we have a flurry of new contributors.
Telemetry is set up here: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/blob/main/packages/bruno-a...
It uses next.js config which is here: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/blob/main/packages/bruno-a...
I don't know when this is evaluated, but it seems like if you set ENV=dev it should disable it.
In the last 5 days, Bruno received 25 PRs. I've already merged 21 of them and shipped multiple releases.
Edit: And good luck, I have looked quite a bit for project like that.
I built the tool for myself, I wanted my collections to co-exist alongside my backend code and be able to version it via git. So I ended up creating a human readable markup language to represent requests so that we can use git to version it.
I hope you like it :)
I am curious: why the request to support OpenAPI turned up only 2 weeks ago? In my bubble it is an ubiquitos format where everything starts and from where any additional data added up.
We don't talk about Bruno.
/S
Sorry, couldn't resist. :)
We don't talk about bruno.
BTW, GRPC will be supported soon. Will create a roadmap section in the docs.
May I ask why .bru? I would really recommend using a standard format. https://xkcd.com/927/ etc..
Insomnia 8.0.0-rc1 was released today: https://insomnia.rest/changelog
The business that ships this codebase is migrating all instances from cloud-optional to cloud-required:
> The challenge is that we cannot continue to offer a great product with all these capabilities while working on an abstraction layer that supports two different storage backends for all data in Insomnia, adds too much complexity to the whole product.
Existing non-cloud users who wish to continue operating without the cloud will need to downgrade to 2023.5.8 to continue accessing their data:
https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/releases/tag/core%402023.5....
HN user ‘RamblingCTO’ (see below) is the author of the GitHub issue.
https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/12...
- Work for some time
- Do the same shit as Postman
- ...
- Profit? Really?
I don’t know even. Why does it have to be the same story all the time? It’s become so tiring.
I do think cloud based sharing/features do have their place in a tool like this however.
I also think these features have a place. I'm quite sad that Kong completely destroyed all trust our company had in them.
Can anyone recommend an open source API client that is content being just an API client?
I guess we can kiss Insomnia goodbye as an option now.
I was like, are you serious? An API testing tool being marketed to people for production purposes?
The moment they started cutting local state out of postman and pushing business customers to use their cloud offering, I was like, "Ah hah hah, nope".
While not quite the same, still feels like awkward timing.
https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/tools/summary/insomnia
*edited to add a link
[1]: https://hurl.dev
Had to migrate away from Thunder client once they announced their pricing and stopping freemium.
I have moved to bruno and its pretty refreshing to use a simple tool without the cloud bloat
Postman's initial startup time could be a bit faster but other than this I'm not missing much (yet). I used it for years occasionally before finally creating an account not so long to sync my requests across devices.
BTW: Jetbrains IDEs like WebStorm also have an integrated HTTP client.
I want to clarify a couple of things:
1) Insomnia can still be used locally in any version prior to this one. The data is there, and can be used.
2) Insomnia still has a local-only mode (Scratch Pad) that doesn't require any account, that anybody can use. A collection can be imported into Scratch Pad for API debugging purposes.
3) There is an onboarding step that clearly states what's going to happen and that allows the user to export the data. We also don't migrate any data until an account is created.
4) Data is not migrated in the cloud when collaborating with Git Sync, which is a capability that allows us to use Git as the source of truth. It is also not migrated without creating an account.
5) When migrating to the cloud, data is fully end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). That is the case for free accounts as well, not only premium plans.
6) Any organization that is serious about security can get in touch with Kong to pass the security compliance assessment and use the cloud like they most likely do with any other vendor.
7) We will even further improve clarity with a new minor version (8.1) that makes all of the above more clear (how to export/import etc).
What's not seen in that conversation, is the large number of users that wanted a product that allowed them to collaborate better, without losing their data, and sync that data securely across multiple clients. Which is why we tried to strike a balance between convenience and feature-richness (cloud) but still provide a local option for other users (Scratch Pad).
I can assure you that we didn't wake up one day and choose violence :) Ultimately, I am also perfectly aware that we can't make everybody happy.
But they're trying to catch up, maybe?
open-source a tool
build userbase
VC funding
rugpull
repeat
I literally just switched to insomnia due to postman doing this so I'm a bit stuck now. Do I go back to fiddler?
update : found response here: https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577#issuecomment-17...
I understand it's intentional
I've previously had good experiences with Paw (now RapidAPI) - https://paw.cloud/, but given that they are closed source and have started giving away the software rather than charging for it, I'm not filled with optimism they won't do a similar rug pull.
1) Receive popup asking if I want to install the latest version (no warning of the consequences of doing so) which I accept
2) Be greeted by a 'sign in' screen as well as a new Scratchpad icon which doesn't contain any of my projects/collections/requests.. at this point I believe all my data has been wiped (and it probably would've been if I had uninstalled the app when I downgraded instead of overwriting the existing one)
3) Find comment in GitHub saying I can recover my data by downgrading to https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/releases/tag/core%402023.5.... and update Preferences not to automatically download and install updates
4) Look for alternatives/wait for community fork
It's a shame because I have promoted your product to over a hundred classmates/coworkers/friends that were previously using Postman/HTTPie/curl.. even if you didn't financially benefit from my use then it also didn't cost you anything, and I provided a lot of free conversions (some of whom might be using your cloud solutions, no idea)..
At least version 2023.5.8 is almost perfect so I'll probably be happy with using that for decades if no better alternative appear.. only downside is that the generated code snippets are kinda shitty (especially for golang, and some obvious languages missing) and I guess I won't be benefiting from improvements made there.
--
A couple of ideas I would personally pay for with the local version of Insomnia:
- Create my own code snippets (so I don't need to rewrite code generated from your Generate Client Code).
- Ability to create HTTP Request templates so you don't need to duplicate existing ones (which you can't do across collections as well).
Have more but I guess it would be a waste of time since you seem fully committed to your choice of violence ^_^
But if you only have one collection, Scratch Pad is still local only. So you can keep using Insomnia on Scratch Pad, still get product updates and it’s free.
But not making it easier to understand what was happening was an oversight, and we will make it more clear in v8.1 (as soon as this week). So 8.0 will be a 2-day release in this regard.
You can also download any previous version of Insomnia and export from there. Without an account, the data never leaves your computer either way.
It's like people learned nothing from the Unity fiasco.
If you want a more minimal solution/CLI https://github.com/httpie/cli and https://github.com/ducaale/xh work
The weird thing is that I can find NO mention of the client on their site: https://rapidapi.com/products/build-apis/
Which, to me, is a bad sign. I suspect someday I'll be forced to give it up.
If you're looking for a tool with a nice UI, Hurl might not be the ideal choice. We're focusing our tool on CLI usage and CI/CD integration.
On the other side, Hurl is a pure Open Source tool, we're not VC backed. The tool is given to the community by a big French telco, Orange, which use it and has no intention to be in the software business. In a word, there is less chance for Hurl to fell into Postman or Insomnia fate...
[1]: https://hurl.dev
There is some missing polish (like missing utilities in scripts or buggy drag-and-drop) and a couple bigger things like no authorization schemes or code export, but the killer thing it has over pretty much all the competition is the JS glue code AND first-class VCS support. Even insomnia had garbage-tier glue code support, something that was very much missing coming from Postman.
Great work!
In every other tool, they treat a collection like something that can be modified only via GUI. In Bruno, its more of a developer mindset. Even if you don't have Bruno GUI, you can open it in an editor and make changes to it - just like code
External npm package installation is unique to Bruno and afaik no other tool has this.
Yes Auth is a big task that I am working on. Glad to see that some folks use scripts and directly implement oauth2 https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/178
Many users are surprised when they find this capabilty, It opens up a lot of possibilities - https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/233#issuecomment-17...
Sure, if I want to stare at a large purple 'Create an account' banner all day, and some three other locations in the UI in which I can click some variety of 'create an account'.
- Is there a way to handle secrets outside of this flow? - Can we set/reference variables between collections? collection A sets a variable, collection B uses it.
also, a small bit of feedback from someone that briefly played with Bruno this morning.
- moving requests in a collection via drag/drop isn't obvious and it's actually a pain if you're trying to replace the top item. - if I duplicate a request I want the new request highlighted and I would personally prefer if the same tab was opened
yes, ALL IN on git :) based collaboration
> Is there a way to handle secrets outside of this flow?
Check: https://docs.usebruno.com/secrets-management/overview.html Two ways of handling secrets.
> collection A sets a variable, collection B uses it.
In bruno collection is the first class citizen, environments reside inside a collection. There is plan to support global environments for the use case you mentioned.
> moving requests in a collection via drag/drop isn't obvious and it's actually a pain if you're trying to replace the top item.
yes, this ux needs to be improved and there is a bug in drag and drop which should be fixed.
I'm guessing your recommendation for dealing with separate environments (dev/qa/etc) would then be a single collection with folders underneath and environments defined w/i that collection.
In that sense collections for bruno seem to be more akin to "projects" and are not really equivalent to postman collections in that sense.
That's workable, it good to know the environments are collection specific rather than global.
I have penned down some thoughts: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/discussions/269
Would love you to hear your thoughts and perspectives.
Sometimes, I wish that I am a billionaire, so that I could let people using my software for free, completely. And the key point is, they know that it is free, absolutely. Because I am a billionaire, they know.
So, just keep it up. Anything you wrote is not important than the thing you do. Don't let people sink you in their perspective about the world they saw.
Open-source software needs a ton of efforts, tears, bloods. Above of the passion, you know that it should be pay-off, fair-price at least, for you and your people hard-works.
At the end, plan is just a plan. Just go to have a chance to fix it.
Good luck and best wishes!
What we need is a better approach. One that doesn't involve VC funding. One that keeps the all the incentives of the community, contributors and the creators aligned.
Will share a draft of this approach soon (likely tomorrow) and open it up for community discussion. I want Bruno to be there for the long term.
First was break a giant collection json and save it as individual files, second attempt was to convert into a dsl (was a bit like xml), the third attempt that is used today to make it even simpler.
The key driving force behind the language design was to make sure that it was simple and readable enough to be able to do a PR review flow in git.
Also, simple enough so that you can open the collection folder in a editor (like vscode) and still be able to make changes
Json didn't support multiline strings. Yaml was indentation hell. I wanted something neat, no need for quotes around strings. And lot of nuances, like how do you store a query param as disabled.
you can read more about the lang design at: https://docs.usebruno.com/bru-language-design.html
if you rename a collection with existing requests in it, the result will be two collections, 1 with the new name and 1 with the old name. The new name will have all the requests as expected.
The old name will be a "ghost" collection, you can't seem to do anything with it, including rename it again. If you close bruno and re-open, the old named collection will be gone.
> if you rename a collection with existing requests in it
I am assuming you are renaming directly using the filesystem. I think this is the is issue you are talking about - https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/28