The Postman open philosophy
Postman was founded on a straightforward premise: we wanted to simplify each step of building an API so developers could create better APIs—faster. From the very beginning, we open-sourced the Postman Runtime, Postman Collection Format, and our SDKs to allow developers the flexibility to work with APIs in any environment or workflow.
Postman has always believed in open dialogue with our community; we continuously make improvements and add new features based on feedback from our community of more than 35 million developers. We are transparent with our roadmaps, we constantly communicate our issues, and we support all major API specifications. That's the Postman open philosophy. But it's more than just a philosophy. We put our commitment to openness into practice every day. Below, you'll find details on a selection of these real-world efforts and projects.
Our open source projects
Postman regularly creates (and constantly improves) open-source projects on GitHub.
Newman
Command-line tool for running and testing a Postman Collection.
Postman Collections Format
Data format that encapsulates Postman API requests.
Postman Collection SDK
SDK to quickly unlock the power of Postman Collections Format using JavaScript.
Postman Code Generators
Convert Postman Collections to usable code in more than 20 different programming languages.
Postman Runtime
The core of Postman that helps to execute Postman API requests, scripts, and tests.
Open projects we love
We consistently use best-of-breed technologies including key open source projects.
We use open source projects
The Postman platform and websites actively use SailsJS, Next.js, Electron, Handlebars, and more.
We support open source projects
The Postman platform supports the Next.js and Bootstrap communities.
We contribute to open source projects
Postman actively works to contribute back to projects and foster contributions—especially from developers just starting out.
Contribute to Postman projects
We value the many contributions from our community of users. Whether they're to the docs, open source projects, the API Network, or more, these contributions improve the experience of other users. We welcome contributions of all kinds, and you don't have to code to be helpful.
Featured projects we use
SailsJS
Sails helps us quickly build Node.js apps—especially when it comes to their auto-generated REST APIs.
Electron
Electron helps us build cross-platform applications (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) with ease.
Handlebars
The new Postman Visualizer feature is one place where you can use Handlebars to visualize your API responses.
JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
This open, industry-standard method for representing claims securely between two parties is supported right in Postman and is used by many of our customers.
Bootstrap
We use Bootstrap, the world's most popular front-end component library, to help us build our front-end UI faster.
Postman open dependencies
Postman relies on the contributions of the open-source community, and we've created a web page where you can view the license information for all third-party dependencies used by Postman.
Postman open technologies: API specifications tools
API specifications have evolved over the last decade to provide API providers and consumers with a machine readable way to describe the surface area of the APIs being published and integrated with.
Postman open technologies: API standards
Industry trade organizations and government agencies are realizing the importance of APIs to the way our increasingly digital world works and have been investing more in defining standards that can be used to increase industry level interoperability.
Postman open technologies: Open source API tooling
API specifications and standards do not mean much without the existence of tooling to help put them to work. Each API specification or standard included in this effort will often have many different open source tooling developed around them, helping deliver across multiple stops along the API lifecycle.
Postman open technologies: Open Data APIs
Open data is the life blood of the API industry, providing much of the common facts, information, and other content that is used. Think postal codes, country names, census data, and other essential data points that are needed in the applications we are building on top of APIs.
Read the blog post: How We're Protecting Your Postman API Keys in GitHub
Developers contribute code to open source projects in GitHub every day; unfortunately, during this process sometimes security credentials are shared by accident. So Postman has implemented a new token-scanning service in GitHub that will send you a notification if you accidentally commit a Postman API key to a public repository. This gives you a chance to respond quickly before there's any unauthorized access your data.
Open positions you'll love
Come to work with the Postman team.
Today there are 35 million developers and over 500K companies using Postman's comprehensive set of built-in tools to support every stage of the API lifecycle. Postman is building the future of API-first software, and we want you to be a part of it.
Collaborate with us
We welcome you to be a contributor to one of our 50 public GitHub repositories.
2024 State of the API report is here!
Discover key API trends from 5,600+ devs and API professionals in Postman's annual report.
