1. Project Overview

Postcat is an extensible API platform. It combines essential API management and testing features and allows you to simplify your API development workflow through plugins, helping you create APIs faster and more efficiently.

Postcat is a powerful, open-source, cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Browsers...) API development and testing tool. It supports protocols such as REST and WebSocket (with GraphQL, gRPC, TCP, and UDP support coming soon), helping you accelerate API development and testing.

While keeping Postcat lightweight and flexible, we have also designed a powerful plugin system. You can enhance Postcat's functionality with a single click by using plugins developed by others, or develop your own Postcat plugins. In theory, Postcat is an API product with unlimited possibilities. To symbolize this potential, we have given Postcat's mascot cat a cape, representing its limitless possibilities.

2. Open Source License

Licensed under Apache-2.0

3. Screenshots

4. Feature Overview

Core Features

• Interface Testing
• API documentation
• Testing Environments
• Global Variables
• Mock

Plugin Marketplace

• Offline Installation

Features and Development Roadmap

• Multi-Protocol Support -- Implemented: HTTP REST, WebSocket -- Coming Soon: GraphQL, TCP, UDP, gRPC
• API Documentation
• API Design
• API Testing
• Mock
• Team Collaboration
• Document Sharing
• Environments
• Global Variables
• Custom Themes and Styles
• Multilingual Support: Chinese, English

How Is Postcat Different from Other API Tools?

More powerful documentation, extensible plugins, and a better user experience

• We provide a plugin marketplace where developers can extend existing functionality and build and assemble tools that suit their needs.
• We are open source, with fully public source code.
• We provide more powerful documentation features.

Extensibility

Postcat supports an extension system with two key benefits:

• Choose only the features you need and enable or disable them at any time.
• When existing features do not meet your requirements, you can develop your own extensions.

Before open-sourcing this product, we accumulated extensive practical experience with API management tools through our commercial products. Therefore, the official team will release official extensions periodically throughout the year, bringing the knowledge and experience gained from our commercial products to the open-source community.

We will also provide corresponding documentation, extension examples, and a series of streamlined developer scaffolding tools, allowing everyone to quickly get started and customize their own tools.

5. Tech Stack

Postcat currently supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and other systems. You can access and download it from the following addresses. We also provide a Web version so you can use it in any browser.

Developing Postcat

Running the Code

Please make sure you have configured the required development environment:

• Node.js >= 14.17.x
• yarn >= 1.22.x

We use yarn as our package manager during development and builds, and strongly recommend that you do the same. However, npm is also perfectly fine if you prefer it, although installing dependencies may take a little longer.

Run the Desktop Application

yarn install
yarn start

Run the Browser Application

cd src/workbench&&npm install
yarn start

Boost Productivity

To improve development efficiency, you can install Angular-cli, the official command-line tool provided by Angular, to quickly generate templates for components, services, and more.

yarn add @angular/cli --global

Built-in Commands

Run Commands

Command

Description

yarn start

In development mode, run simultaneously in the browser and desktop application

yarn start:web

Run only in the browser, with the backend proxy enabled

yarn start:electron

Run only in the desktop application

Build and Package

Command

Description

sudo yarn build

Package Electron Applications for Each Operating System

Run Test

Command

Description

yarn test

Run Unit Tests