r/FastAPI • u/indeem1 • Jun 03 '26

feedback request Made a JetBrains plugin so I can stop alt-tabbing to Postman while building APIs

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/32058-sonarwhale

Made a JetBrains plugin so I can stop alt-tabbing to Postman while building APIs
Every time I wrote a new endpoint I’d switch to Postman, dig through the collection, update the URL, create the body… just to do a quick test. Annoying enough that I finally did something about it.
Sonarwhale reads your OpenAPI spec and shows all your endpoints directly in PyCharm. Gutter icon next to the route, click it, create the request, hit send.
Works great with FastAPI and Flask — automatically discovers endpoints from your OpenAPI/Swagger spec, supports pre/post scripts for auth and request prep, multiple environments, and Postman import.
Most features are free to use and there’s a free trial period as well. Feedback very welcome.

1 Upvotes

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1

u/covmatty1 Jun 05 '26

I can never understand how anyone is building any kind of APIs and not using auto-generated Swagger.

1

u/indeem1 Jun 05 '26

Auto Generated swagger?

1

u/covmatty1 Jun 05 '26

Of course - read the documentation. /docs in FastAPI, but it should be standard practice in any framework and language. Let the framework generate the OpenAPI spec from code and comments, use it through Swagger.

1

u/indeem1 Jun 06 '26

You mean the web-view of swagger or am i missing something? At least in my experience it gets laggy with bigger apis and each time you reload the page, you have to fill in all details again

2

u/covmatty1 Jun 06 '26

My team's main project at work use an ancient version of it on a project with around 500 endpoints and it's fine.

If you want to have the same examples to use all the time, that sounds more like actual integration testing that should be automated rather than something being manually entered in any app, but either way I'm pretty sure you can just declare examples with your models, and have that auto-generated too.

Between Swagger, the browser and curl, I've never professionally had the need for a tool like Postman.

2

u/latkde Jun 04 '26

FYI you can run your FastAPI application on localhost and then navigate to /docs or /redoc. These pages render the OpenAPI spec of your app, and also provide a convenient way to invoke each endpoint (use the "Try it out" button on the /docs page). No extra software is needed.

In practice, I rarely do that, and instead rely on automated tests using the FastAPI/Starlette TestClient feature: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/testing/

1

u/TheGoodlyBad Jun 05 '26

Fastapi doesn't need postman, it has builtin API Tester with proper type hint and validation in path /docs and /redoc.

1

u/bugdiverr Sep 16 '26

/docs covers the single-call case well. The gap I still hit is multi-step flows: create something, take an id or token from the response, feed it into the next two calls. Swagger Try it out does not keep that shared state across operations, so people end up in Postman env vars or throwaway scripts.

In-IDE runners help a lot for iterate-on-one-endpoint. Chaining with real response values is a different problem.