Bruno is the latest kid on the block when it comes to API testing. Many of us are familiar with API clients such as Postman or Insomnia. Unfortunately, these useful tools weren’t spared from the ongoing enshittification. Insomnia, recently taken over by Kong, suffered in particular. The rewrite is as buggy as Windows 8 on the day of its unfortunate release, and it was stripped of essential functionality unless you pay. So I was on the lookout for alternatives. It seems like Bruno hits the sweet spot. As the authors declare on their GitHub page:

Bruno is a new and innovative API client, aimed at revolutionizing the status quo represented by Postman and similar tools out there. Bruno stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem. We use a plain text markup language, Bru, to save information about API requests. You can use Git or any version control of your choice to collaborate over your API collections.Bruno is offline-only. There are no plans to add cloud-sync to Bruno, ever.

Bruno client is packed with functionality, it looks nice and neat. But how is it different from Postman or Insomnia? For me, the following blend of unique features was convincing:

Plain-text user-readable definitions

Bruno stores definitions of your API endpoints in plain text files. One file per endpoint, and stored in actual disk folders, if you decide to group your endpoints into folders. This unlike Insomnia’s big JSON blob of everything, which might be human-readable but come on… Here’s an example of a simple request file:

meta {
  name: User Exists
  type: http
  seq: 2
}

get {
  url: {{api_security}}/user/{{username}}/exists
  body: none
  auth: bearer
}

auth:bearer {
  token: {{session_token}}
}

I can edit these files by hand if need be. They’re now full members of our code base. Just like with any other code file, we can easily compare them, see who changed what, revert to older versions etc.

Command-line support

You can run the requests from command line - either individual files, folders or even the entire collection. Just install the Bruno CLI tool and off we go:

bru run ./LogIn.bru

Running Request

./Log In (200 OK) - 119 ms
   ✓ assert: res.status: eq 200
   ✓ assert: res.body.session: isDefined
   ✓ assert: res.body.session.user: isDefined
   ✓ assert: res.body.session.token: isDefined
   ✓ Security/Login Succeeded

Requests:    1 passed, 1 total
Tests:       1 passed, 1 total
Assertions:  4 passed, 4 total

Integration Tests

Requests can be equipped with tests and assertions. This, combined with the command-line Bruno runner, gives us an exciting way to create comprehensive integration tests for our APIs! For simple checks you can add assertions in your request file:

assert {
  res.status: eq 200
  res.body.session: isDefined
  res.body.session.user: isDefined
  res.body.session.token: isDefined
  res.body.session.user.name: eq {{username}}
}

For more complex checks you can write proper test cases. Bruno uses the familiar Chai library to run your tests:

tests {
  test("Login Succeeded", () => {
    const { session } = res.getBody()
    expect(session).to.exist
    expect(session.user).to.exist
    expect(session.user.name).to.equal(req.body.name)
  })
}

Summary

These three features, in addition to what one would expect from any API client tool, and Bruno’s fair and honest policies and no forcing of cloud sync, make it an excellent addition to my tool belt. Goodbye, Insomnia!