Create a New Request in Postman to Make a GET Request to an API
In this lesson, you'll learn how to create a new GET request in Postman. We'll walk through finding request creation in the UI and configuring the request to successfully see a response.
Colby Fayock: [0:00] We're going to start off for the first time opening Postman. To get started, we're going to create a new GET request. To do that, we're going to use the Star Wars API, where we can do things like request all of our favorite characters.
[0:10] To get started, the first thing we can do is request this people API. We're going to go to Postman and the first thing we want to do is create a new request. We can do that by either clicking Create a request in the launchpad or we can go up to the orange New button and click Request. Refer the request name, we can put something like Luke Skywalker.
[0:26] Before we hit Save, all requests require a collection. A collection is a group of requests. In this menu, we can click Create Collection and let's call this Favorite Characters. Then we can hit the orange checkbox and we can hit Save to Favorite Characters.
[0:40] The first thing you'll notice that we have a new UI. At the top, we'll see that it's automatically set to GET. We also have a space where we can enter in our request URL. Inside the request URL, let's paste in our API URL for Luke Skywalker.
[0:52] Once we paste that in, we can simply hit Send and once it's finished, we'll get a success message. We can even see all the data that's associated with this API response. If I move this menu up, we can scroll down and we can see all the data that's associated with Luke Skywalker. We can even see the time it took to make that request and the size of the response.
[1:08] If we want to know the response headers, we can click the Headers tab, where we can see all the header information about our request.
[1:13] In review, we wanted to create a new request in Postman to get a response from an API. We created a new request in order to get information about Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars API. Once we pasted in that endpoint, we were able to hit Send, where we could see that it was successfully requested, and we see all of our data.