How to Send WebSocket Requests with Postman ?

This article will show how to send WebSocket requests in Postman. Postman is a popular collaborative platform for API development. It offers different tools for designing, debugging, and testing an API, making it more efficient. WebSocket is an advanced technology used for real-time bidirectional communication between clients and servers. Postman allows the creation, sending, and analysis of WebSocket requests like HTTP requests.

What is WebSocket?

WebSocket is bidirectional, a full-duplex protocol that is used in the same scenario of client-server communication, unlike HTTP which starts from ws:// or wss://. It is a stateful protocol, which means the connection between client and server will stay alive until it is terminated by either party (client or server). After closing the connection by either the client or server, the connection is terminated from both ends. 

Understanding the concept of Postman:

Postman is an API(application programming interface) development tool that helps to build, test and modify APIs. Almost any functionality that could be needed by any developer is encapsulated in this tool. It is used by over 5 million developers every month to make their API development easy and simple. It can make various types of HTTP requests(GET, POST, PUT, PATCH), save environments for later use, converting the API to code for various languages(like JavaScript, and Python). 

Steps to Send WebSocket requests with Postman:

Install Postman: Make sure you have Postman installed on your system. To learn how to download Postman, refer to Download & install Postman article

Step 1: Open Postman either on your desktop or in your browser, click on the “New” button in the top left corner menu option. A dropdown menu will appear to select WebSocket from the dropdown.
Step 2: Now enter websocket URL in request URL field in new tab. WebSocket URL starts with “ws://” or “wss://” for unsecured and secured connections respectively.

Step 3: In this example we will use echo URL provided by WebSocket.org. When you connect to “wss://echo.websocket.org” using a WebSocket client, you establish a WebSocket connection to the echo server. Once the connection is established, any message you send to the server will be sent back to you. Click the “Connect” button.

Step 4: After connecting with server you can send messages to the server. The message can be JSON, XML and normal text. Click on text option and you can see options. Type your message and click on “Send”. Now you can see message sent by server to you in Response. Because of echo server it is sending same message.

Step 5: Now click on “Disconnect” button to disconnect the websocket connection.

Conclusion:

You’ve successfully sent a WebSocket request using Postman. Remember that WebSocket requests may require additional configuration or authentication depending on the specific WebSocket server you’re connecting to. Make sure to handle any authentication or authorization requirements as needed.