You can send your first API call with Postman in under a minute, and it’s less about the API and more about the HTTP request itself.
Let’s fire up Postman and make a GET request to a public API. We’ll use https://rickandmortyapi.com/api/character. This is a simple, free API that serves up data about characters from the Rick and Morty show.
In Postman, you’ll see a row of controls. The first dropdown is for the HTTP method. For retrieving data, you almost always want GET. To its right, there’s a URL bar. Paste https://rickandmortyapi.com/api/character into it.
Below the URL bar, you’ll see tabs for Params, Authorization, Headers, Body, Pre-request Script, and Tests. For a basic GET request, we don’t need any of these. The URL itself is enough.
To the right of the URL bar, there’s a big blue button that says "Send". Click it.
Postman will then display the response from the server. At the bottom, you’ll see a status code (like 200 OK), the time it took to get the response, and the size of the response. To the left of that, a large area shows the actual data returned by the API, usually in JSON format. This specific API returns a JSON object with keys like info (containing metadata about the request) and results (a list of character objects).
This process is the bedrock of interacting with APIs. You specify what you want (the URL), how you want it (the HTTP method, GET in this case), and Postman handles the network communication and displays the server’s reply. Every API interaction, no matter how complex, starts here.
The GET method is idempotent, meaning making the same GET request multiple times has the same effect as making it once – it just retrieves data without changing anything on the server. This is a crucial property for reliability.
The next step is to see how you can filter or query that data.