I’ve been trying to keep more of my development workflow inside IntelliJ IDEA and the terminal, especially for backend projects.
Postman is still useful when exploring APIs, but for day-to-day development I wanted something that fits better into a CLI-based workflow and can be reused in automation.
The features I was looking for were:
- Run API tests from the terminal
- Support multiple environments
- Integrate with CI/CD
- Work with OpenAPI-based APIs
- Produce consistent results in local development and automated pipelines
After trying tools like curl, HTTPie, and Newman, I’ve been using Apidog CLI.
What I like is that I can run the same API test scenarios locally while coding in IntelliJ IDEA and then execute those same tests in our CI pipeline without maintaining separate GUI-based workflows.
Keeping API validation in the terminal has made our development process much more consistent while still using the IDE for coding.
I’d be interested to hear what other JetBrains users are using as a command-line alternative to Postman and how it fits into your workflow.