Getting Started with Twilio's Postman Collections
Learning how to use a 3rd party API can be a difficult task. Luckily, visual API development tools such as Postman make the learning journey much easier!
As part of Twilio's rollout of its OpenAPI specification, we now provide a Postman collection which you can use to visually explore and interact with Twilio's API without writing code. In this article, we'll learn how to buy a phone number and send an SMS text message using Twilio's Postman Collection and a Postman Environment.
Before you start, be sure to complete the following prerequisites. You can skip to Getting started with Twilio's Postman Collection if you've already completed these steps and know what Postman is.
- Create a free account with Postman
- Create a free Twilio account.
Postman is a free and easy-to-use development tool for making API calls with a variety of helpful features.
A Postman Collection is a way to group related request templates together in a folder structure. This allows for easy organization of requests, and even better, Postman allows us to export collections to share with one another.
Instead of referencing the Twilio Docs and creating your own collection, you can visit the Twilio Postman Collection page where you will find collections maintained by the Twilio team.
GET and POST requests to explore.
An Environment in Postman is simply a group of related variables that you can reference when making calls, instead of needing to manually repeat their values throughout your calls.
Similar to collections, you may also create a fork of an Environment. To make the process of setting up your Environment as straightforward as possible, there is a Twilio Environment which you can fork to provide the variables for your forked collection.
To fork the Twilio Environment:
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On the left-hand side of the Postman web UI click the Environments tab, then select the Twilio Environment.