Getting started with Postman

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will discuss what Postman is and how to quickly get set up with it.

Postman is a desktop and web application that allows you to make requests to an API from a graphical user interface. We recommend using Postman with the Twitter API, Twitter Ads API, and Labs endpoints when exploring the APIs functionality, as well as when you are troubleshooting issues with your application.

We currently have three Postman collections available:

Prerequisites

Before you get started with using Twitter’s Postman collections, you will need to make sure you have the proper access and credentials for the Twitter developer platform tool of your choosing. You can learn more about getting access via our “Getting started” page.

Once you have an approved developer account, have set up a developer App and have a set of authentication keys and tokens, and have properly set up your environment to make requests to the specific API that you plan to use, you can follow the below steps to get started.

Getting started with Twitter's Postman collections

Step one: Add one of the Twitter Postman collections to your account

While you could build out the specific endpoints that you’d like to use within Postman, we did all of the heavy lifting for you and built out a ready to use collection of relevant APIs. Just click one of the links in the earlier “Postman collections” section and a collection with all of the endpoints associated with the selected API will be added to your Postman app. These collections are also available in the Postman API network. Each endpoint will automatically include available parameters, example responses, and authentication type plugged in, so you just need to add your credentials and parameter values to start exploring the functionality.

In this example, we are going to work with the Twitter API v2 collection.

Step two: Add your keys and tokens as environmental variables

When you add the collection to your Postman instance, it will automatically add an environment called ‘Twitter API v2’, which you will need to add your keys and tokens to. In this step, we will walk you through the process of adding your keys and tokens from your developer App into the ‘Twitter API v2’ environment.

To add your keys and tokens to the “Twitter API v2” environment, click on the “manage environments” button in the top right corner of Postman., you will need to click on the settings button in the top right corner.

This image shows the "manage environments" button highlighted in the Postman console.

From the list of environments, click on “Twitter API v2”.

Next, add a variable for all of the different keys and tokens that you’ve generated via the Apps dashboard into the table. Here is an example of what your table should look like:

VARIABLE	INITIAL VALUE	CURRENT VALUE
consumer_key	`QAktM6W6DF6F7XXXXXX`	`QAktM6W6DF6F7XXXXXX`
consumer_secret	`AJX560A2Omgwyjr6Mml2esedujnZLHXXXXXX`	`AJX560A2Omgwyjr6Mml2esedujnZLHXXXXXX`
access_token	`1995XXXXX-0NGqVhk3s96IX6SgT3H2bbjOPjcyQXXXXXXX`	`1995XXXXX-0NGqVhk3s96IX6SgT3H2bbjOPjcyQXXXXXXX`
token_secret	`rHVuh7dgDuJCOGeoe4tndtjKwWiDjBZHLaZXXXXXX`	`rHVuh7dgDuJCOGeoe4tndtjKwWiDjBZHLaZXXXXXX`
bearer_token	`AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL9v6AAAAAAA99t03huuqRYg0mpYAAFRbPR3XXXXXXX`	`AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL9v6AAAAAAA99t03huuqRYg0mpYAAFRbPR3XXXXXXX`

Note that the keys and tokens used in the above table are made up and will not work if used in a request.

Once you’ve added your credentials as variables and have made sure that the Twitter API v2 environment is selected, you will be ready to make requests to the Twitter API v2 collection. This is because each of the endpoint’s authorization tabs are set up to automatically inherit the variables from this environment.

Step three: Select an endpoint

Next step is to choose an endpoint from the collection and start to build your request. You can select an endpoint from the right-hand side navigation. Here is what this looks like:

This image shows the "Single Tweets" request selected under the "Tweet Lookup" dropdown in the "Twitter API v2" section.

For this example, we are going to use the Twitter API v2 > Tweet Lookup > Single Tweet endpoint.

Step four: Add values to the Params tab

Next step will have you navigate to the Params tab. You should see a set of inactive params with descriptions that explain what the parameter does, and a list of all of the potential values that you can pass with your request.

In this example, we are going to activate the expansions and tweet.fields query parameters and add the following values:

Key	Value
tweet.fields	created_at,attachments
expansions	author_id

In addition to adding the query parameters, we need to add the required Path Variable, id. Since this endpoint returns Tweets, we need to add a valid Tweet ID as the value.

You can find the Tweet ID by navigating to twitter.com and clicking on a Tweet, and then looking in the URL. For example, the following URL's Tweet ID is 1228393702244134912:

https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1228393702244134912

On the Params tab, scroll down past all of the query parameters to display the “Path Variables” section. We will be adding the Tweet ID that you would like to use as a value to the id key.

If you’ve entered everything from this step correctly, the Params tab should look like the following:

This image shows the "Params" table filled out based on the instructions included earlier in the page.

Step five: Send your request and review your response

Now that everything is set up in your request, you can click the “Send” button.

If everything was set up properly, you should receive the following payload:

      {
    "data": {
        "author_id": "2244994945",
        "text": "What did the developer write in their Valentine’s card?\n  \nwhile(true) {\n    I = Love(You);  \n}",
        "id": "1228393702244134912",
        "created_at": "2020-02-14T19:00:55.000Z"
    },
    "includes": {
        "users": [
            {
                "username": "TwitterDev",
                "name": "Twitter Dev",
                "id": "2244994945"
            }
        ]
    }
}

What's next

If you click on the button in Postman that says "Code", you can turn the request we just created into the language of your choosing such as Python, Node or Ruby to help you get started. Postman has great documentation that might be helpful. We also have some sample code on GitHub that can help you get integrated with the endpoints more quickly.