Postman Quickstarts

Watch the How to Contribute to Postman Quickstarts video demo:

What are Postman Quickstarts?

Postman Quickstarts are interactive tutorials and self-serve demos written in markdown syntax. Quickstarts provide a step-by-step reading experience and automatically saves tutorial progress for readers. These tutorials are published at quickstarts.postman.com

You can submit your own Quickstarts to be published on Postman's website by submitting a pull request to this repo. This repository contains all the tools and documentation you’ll need for building, writing, and submitting your own Quickstart.

What's special about the Quickstart format?

• Powerful and flexible authoring flow in Markdown text
• Ability to produce interactive web or markdown tutorials without writing any code
• Easy interactive previewing
• Usage monitoring via Google Analytics
• Support for multiple target environments or events (conferences, kiosk, web, offline, etc.)
• Support for anonymous use - ideal for public computers at developer events
• Looks great, with a responsive web implementation
• Remembers where the student left off when returning to a quickstart
• Mobile friendly user experience

Getting Started

Prerequisites

1. Install Node 14; Homebrew installed? brew install node@14
   • Install gulp-cli npm i -g gulp-cli
2. Install Go; Homebrew installed? brew install golang
   • Install claat go install github.com/googlecodelabs/tools/claat@latest
   • Ensure go and claat is in your PATH claat path setup
3. Optional: install the live-reload plugin for Chrome: LiveReload

Run locally

1. Fork this repository to your personal github account (top right of webpage, fork button)
2. Clone your new fork git clone git@github.com:<YOUR-USERNAME>/pmquickstarts.git pmquickstarts
3. Navigate to the site directory cd pmquickstarts/site
4. Install node dependencies npm install
5. Run the site npm run serve

Congratulations! You now have the Postman Quickstarts landing page running which can be reached at http://localhost:8000/.

Common Errors

1. Claat related errors

• Make sure Go is properly in your PATH. Add the following lines to your profile (~/.profile, or ~/.zshrc):

#adding Golang to path
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/go/bin

*Note: After adding Go to your PATH, be sure to apply your new profile: source ~/.profile or source ~/.zshrc*

2. You get a EACCES error when installing gulp-cli

• This means that your npm location needs to be updated. Follow the steps here: Resolve EACCESS permissions

3. You get Error: Cannot find module 'postcss' when running npm run serve

• The module may not have been installed for some reason so run npm install --save-dev postcss gulp-postcss and then rerun npm run serve

Write Your First Quickstart

1. Terminate the running server with ctrl C and and navigate to the pmguides source directory cd pmguides/src

   • In this directory, you will see all existing guides and their markdown files.

2. Generate a new guide from the guide template npm run template <GUIDE-NAME>

   • Don't use spaces in the name of your guide, instead use hyphens to separate words.

     npm run template securing-api-keys

3. Navigate to the newly generated guide (cd pmguides/src/<GUIDE-NAME>) and edit your guide in a tool like vscode.

4. Run the website again npm run serve

5. As you edit and save changes, your changes will automatically load in the browser.

Tips

• Review the sample.md file to learn more about how to structure and format your Quickstart for the claat tool.
• You can see the supported Quickstart categories here. If you want to suggest a new category please create a github issue.
• Check out how to use VS Code to write markdown files

How do I get my Postman Quickstart on quickstarts.postman.com?

1. Fork this repository
2. Clone it to your local system
3. Make a new branch
4. Make your changes
5. Push it back to your repo
6. Open this repository on GitHub.com
7. Click the Pull Request button to open a new pull request
8. Postman will review and approve the submission

To learn more about how to submit a pull request on GitHub in general, check out GitHub's official documentation.

Create tutorial in a non-English language

If you are interested in submitting a tutorial in a non-English language, we require at least two learning modules along with a separate reviewer for the new language before adding it to the site. Currently, the site supports the following non-English languages.

• fr - French

Change into the /site directory. Create the name of the tutorial and include the language tag at the end of the name, such as fr for French language.

$ cd site
$ npm run template lost-in-space-fr

In the page metadata at the top, update status to "Hidden". Add language tag to tags in the metadata.

author: Joyce
id: lost-in-space-fr
summary: This is an API game
categories: Game
environments: web
status: Hidden
feedback link: https://github.com/postmanlabs/pmquickstarts
tags: Game, fr

How to deploy (for project maintainers)

Change into the site/ directory, and run the deploy script, which builds and publishes site at https://quickstarts.postman.com/.

$ cd site
$ npm run deploy

Note: To update custom domain, update the CNAME file in app/CNAME and BASE_URL in gulpfile.js