After Insomnia forced account creation and my saved API requests disappeared, I switched to Bruno, a free and open-source API client available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI and VS Code plugins. Bruno stores request collections as human-readable text files, making them easy to commit to source control alongside code. The writeup includes my first impressions after an afternoon of use...
I deploy a small Node.js and Express service from my MacBook to an Ubuntu VPS, covering the choice between a native install and a Docker container, installing Node and npm via apt (including why the Ubuntu repository version is quite old), and copying project files to the server with scp rather than setting up git-based CI/CD for such a tiny project. I test with Insomnia instead of Postman, which I avoid because of its data collection...
