Postman
Our APIs can be used with any HTTP client; choose your favorite! We love Postman, it's a friendly graphical interface to a powerful cross-platform HTTP client.
Try our "run in Postman" button to get a quick start on our most well-used APIs:
If you need any of our Beta or Developer Preview APIs, read on for how to use the OpenAPI documents from the API reference pages with Postman.
Postman and OpenAPI
Postman has support for the OpenAPI documents that we publish with all our APIs.
If you're new to OpenAPI, we have a Guide to OpenAPI specifically for you!
Install Postman and follow the steps laid out below to very quickly try out any of the Vonage APIs. We publish an OpenAPI document for each API and Postman can read these and create a collection of requests that you can enter values into.
Get the OpenAPI Description of the API
The easiest way to find the OpenAPI document is to click the "Download OpenAPI 3 Specification" button on the API reference for the API you'd like to try. For example visit the Verify API reference page and click the download button. The files are in .yml
format.
We also publish all our API descriptions on GitHub, if you'd like to see the whole collection, they're in the definitions/
folder: https://github.com/nexmo/api-specification
Import Spec into Postman
Start Postman and look for the "Import" button above the left hand bar. Browse to find the .yml
file you want to use, and choose "Open", and then "Next".
In the left hand side bar, you will now have a folder/collection for your API, and inside it a template request for each of the endpoints in the API.
Make an API Call
For example if you imported the Verify API description, you'd be able to choose "Verify Request" from the left hand bar, and get a ready-made request to use. Go ahead and add the fields you need:
- Your API credentials! For Verify API that's the
API_KEY
andAPI_SECRET
fields and you can find these details in your account dashboard - The phone number to Verify (remember to use E.164 format)
- The name of the brand doing the verifying (you can choose anything here as you are only testing things)
- Set the
format
value in the path parameters section tojson
Now press "Send" and check the response from the API.
Postman Advanced Usage
We're big fans of Postman so we thought we'd share our best tips with you here.
Use Environments
Postman has an environments feature that is really useful when you're using the same variables (such as your API credentials) in many different requests.
To create an environment, click the settings cog in the top right hand side of the screen and choose "Add". Give your environment a name, and add any variables you want to use, such as:
api_key
api_secret
phone_number
Save the values and then in your request, instead of pasting in your API key, you can type {{api_key}}
and Postman will use the value from the current environment.
You can have multiple environments, which is useful if you use different keys for different things, or if you are sending API requests to a debugging tool or API mocking server such as Prism. Add as many environments as you need by repeating the steps above and choosing the environment to use from the dropdown in the top right hand section of the screen.
Postman collections
For information about Postman collections see the Postman Collections documentation.