Restricted access to public documentation

[zachheine]

I have set up the subdomain docs.ourdomain.com and would like to be able to publish our docs so that only logged-in team members can see them.

[ramji367]

We are thinking of improvements to address this issue and would like to get more ideas from the community. You can share your feedback and provide suggestions directly to the product team by signing up using this link

@duaneb69 @AbdwGTK @ariadnavaldivia @coccoinomane

[njnice]

We are thinking of improvements to address this issue and would like to get more ideas from the community. You can share your feedback and provide suggestions directly to the product team by signing up using this link

@duaneb69 @AbdwGTK @ariadnavaldivia @coccoinomane

I don't know if it's worth a whole half hour of your time - but my use case as a PM is to restrict access to documentation. Here's a breakdown that might be useful:

1. Some endpoints I want semi-public, i.e. I only want to show selected endpoints to customers, contractors, partners, or sales engineers. I may or may not want this to be assessable by anyone on the internet.

2. Then there are non-developers who need occasional access to documentation about all my endpoints but will never add to or modify a collection. That group is people like customer support, implementations, technical account managers, and product managers. I absolutely want this protected through some kind of credentialing. The reality is a lot of endpoints in a collection have no business being seen by most people because they're part of back end systems, but there are enough non-developers that need to see the current docs once in a while. Without credentialling, it's a nightmare to keep unsupported or changing backend endpoints from being discovered by people who shouldn't have access to them.

3. Finally, there's developers who will actually have full postman licenses and modify endpoints, collections, documentation, etc.

There's a bunch of ways to approach it. Off the top of my head, it could be as simple as requiring a login to see some docs and compare that against a list of authorized users created by the collection owner. Or if you're really pressed for resources, you could even just add a way to create passwords without any credentials at all for a given collection. Not the best, but at least I could give someone a password and delete it.

[saimow]

stop ignoring this please...

[ramji367]

@njnice - Thanks for the detailed feedback. There are some ways to address this using Postman today.

If you are on Free, Basic or Professional plan, use the Guest role

1. Create a free Postman team (if you don't already have one) or use an existing team. Having a team is a pre-requisite to collaborate and share resources in Postman
2. Make sure the collection(s) with the documentation you want to share are in a Team workspace
3. Click on ... menu in the collection and choose Share. Enable the toggle called "Allow to join your team and view this collection with the link"
4. Share the copied link with the recipient.

If you are on the Postman Enterprise plan, use Partner workspaces

1. Create a partner workspace
2. Move or copy the collection(s) with the documentation to the partner workspace
3. Click on the 'Invite' button at the top. Select Partners and click Continue.
4. Enter the email addresses of the recipients. If you select the Role as Viewer, these partners are free.

If either of the above solutions don't work, can you share what's missing and how we can make it better.

[margerabe]

Thank you for replying @ramji367 but it seems to me that you're giving the exact same answer as given by @preethammavin above, and which does (still) not address the issue 🙃...

It seems that the misunderstanding lies in the fact that we (well at least I do 😄) want to share the published documentation, (you know, the one with the public URL and the nice stylised UI), not the collection in the Postman client/UI. And it's those public docs that we want to protect with a password/credentials.

Please 🥺

[coccoinomane]

Hi @ramji367,

I can confirm what was written by @margerabe.

As far as I am concerned, I do not even need fancy user management...

Just let us password-protect the public URL with the documentation.

Cheers, Cocco

[ramji367]

Thanks for clarifying! I understand the value of the published API documentation page. We will brainstorm with the team and come up with a solution here.

[lmuther8]

My team is also looking for the ability to have hosted docs behind a password!

[rohit-c247]

Hello @ramji367 @postman-staff Please confirm if there is a feature available to access to a Postman collection document to specific team members only, and ensure that it cannot be accessed publicly on the Postman network. Also, please provide information on which plan this feature is available in.

[imonacloud]

+1 here

The published documentation user interface is nice, and bookmark-able as a clean presentation layer for the API. The APP UI/UX is great for all of the jobs to be done around developing APIs.

I went through the motions of publishing documentation to be able to share with my team who is less familiar with Postman App to find that it was public by default with no option to keep it private to only my team. This is because we have a private API that is not exposed to the public, yet, but it would be super helpful to be able to segment public/private documentation so that a development team can keep "everything in one place" in terms of the APIs they manage.

[mschaefer-gresham]

@ramji367 can you please provide an update on where you are in terms of providing an solution?

[ramji367]

@rohit-c247 @imonacloud @mschaefer-gresham - We don't have a timeline for the private documentation-view that many of you have been asking for. In the mean time you can share Postman collections privately with specific external partners using Partner Workspaces.

We recently launched multi-partner workspaces on the Professional and Enterprise plans. This allows you to invite multiple external partners to your Postman workspace with complete confidentiality between partners. They can view collections and read the embedded documentation. You can read about it here and it was also featured in the Postman Drop for September.

I know this doesn't directly address the feedback on the thread about having a private documentation-view. But Partner Workspaces provide a more collaborative experience and allow you to actually try out the API by sending requests.