Bruno asserts

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I mentioned Bruno the other day. Although it’s still very much under development, it is shaping up as a great Postman/Insomnia replacement.

One of the aspects I’ve been using today is asserts. As part of a request, you can add some asserts - so when you’re hitting an endpoint it will check what status should it be returning, or given the data you’re passing in, what should be in the response body.

When I’d asked ChatGPT to to review the mdserver code, it had suggested that I should be sanitising URL inputs better to prevent users transversing out of the ‘public’ file directory to other places in the file system. I thought Express had already taken care of this for me, but wanted to check. I had ChatGPT generate a bunch of pass and fail URL examples, then just created asserts for each one in Bruno.

Once that’s done, you can just right click on the collection and have it run all of those.

An extra benefit of Bruno is that all these requests are stored as JSON-like, version-controllable text. I store them in my project and commit them along with the rest of my code.

We need to talk about Bruno

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that I was using Insomnia as a tool to check my REST APIs as I was developing them, and that I was avoiding Postman (which I guess is more widely used since it’s worth USD5.6 billion) because

The only reason I’m using Insomnia instead of Postman is that when I tried Postman, it straight away wanted some of my data to make it work. Insomnia hasn’t forced me to do that yet.

Sadly that was prophetic. I saw @wtpisaac@vmst.io mention this exact thing had happened.

The following day when I opened up Insomnia, it asked to upgrade and I said no, and was able to write and save a handful of new calls to test the API I was building. Sadly, I closed it, and of course on the next run, it demanded an account be created. I skipped that, and it presented me with a “sandbox” and all my saved requests were gone.

Luckily, Isaac also suggests a solution - Bruno. This is a 1K star FOSS project by helloanoop. There are Mac, Windows and Linux clients, as well as a CLI and VSCode plugins. One of it’s selling points (apart from it’s not Postman or Insomnia) is that the collections of requests are saved in very simple human readable text (a language called bru) so it’s straightforward and sensible to commit them to source control along with your code.

This video from Anoop (with a very clickbait-y title) does a good job of explaining his project.

I’ve only played around with Bruno for an afternoon, but I’m loving it so far. Seems like it will do everything I need, and the diffable files for the requests are a bonus. This is a project that deserves to be better known.

Bruno on blog.iankulin.com

Bruno asserts

We need to talk about Bruno