Postman — Installation on Linux

Postman

Postman is a collaboration platform for API development. Postman’s features simplify each step of building an API and streamline collaboration so you can create better APIs — faster. I use Postman for checking the POST and GET requests in my Node.js server and testing out APIs. Postman is a very powerful tool and if you’re into backend development, you should try it out.

Postman is free to download and use for Mac, Windows and Linux. You can find the download links here.

I am writing this post as a guide for Linux users. It is easy to download and install applications in a Mac or Windows PC, but comparatively difficult in Linux. So, here goes:

Installing Postman on a Linux Machine:

I use Manjaro Linux as my primary operating system. You can check my other post on Manjaro/Linux on this link. You can follow the same path to install Postman on any Linux distribution.

1. Fire up a terminal and run this command to download the Postman tar.gz compressed file.

wget https://dl.pstmn.io/download/latest/linux64 -O postman-linux-x64.tar.gz

The terminal will start downloading Postman

2. Next, run the following command to extract the downloaded files.

sudo tar xvzf postman-linux-x64.tar.gz -C /opt

Your terminal will look like this after it has completed extracting the files.

3. Run the following command to link your files.

sudo ln -s /opt/Postman/Postman /usr/bin/postman

That’s it! You have successfully installed Postman on your Linux PC.

If you want to add a desktop entry, follow the following steps:

1. Run the following command in the terminal, next.

cat << EOF > ~/.local/share/applications/postman2.desktop

2. Copy and paste the following lines and press enter.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Postman
GenericName=API Client
X-GNOME-FullName=Postman API Client
Comment=Make and view REST API calls and responses
Keywords=api;
Exec=/opt/Postman/Postman
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/opt/Postman/app/resources/app/assets/icon.png
Categories=Development;Utilities;
EOF

Installation successfully completed