Can’t sleep? If it was up to Kong you’d be building APIs with its new collab tool

Can’t sleep? If it was up to Kong you’d be building APIs with its new collab tool

API platform provider Kong finally put the knowledge of recently acquired Insomnia to good use, releasing collaborative GraphQL and REST API editing tool Insomnia Designer into the world.

As the name suggests, Insomnia Designer focuses on API design, though developers can also use it to manage, debug, and test APIs following a configuration-first approach. Its creators aim at “empower[ing] existing workflows, and provide unified workflows where needed” by utilising concepts such as GitOps and infrastructure as code.

The main element users of Insomnia Designer will get to work with are the so-called documents, entities made up of an API specification, an Insomnia Core project, environments, a git sync configuration, and “configuration related to the document or core project”. 

Insomnia Designer works on a local filesystem, to enable collaboration on OpenAPI documents etc the git sync feature however makes sure it can be synchronized with a source control repository or repo management services such as GitHub and GitLab.

The project is built on Insomnia Core, a REST client Insomnia was known for, and is set up to be extendable through plugins. It is said to support OpenAPI 2.x and 3.x out of the box when working on requests and recommends using YAML for specifications. 

Specifications can be used as a basis for automatically generating requests later on, meanwhile an integrated validation unit points API developers to issues in the specification as it is written. Insomnia Designer also provides API debugging capabilities Insomnia Core users will already be familiar with. 

Since the offer is bound to interest Kong users above all else, the initial release also integrates with the API platform, so that those interested can deploy to Kong Portal, or generate Kong Declarative or Kong for Kubernetes configurations. Owners of Insomnia Plus or Team accounts will have to practise patience for now, since support for such accounts is still on the company’s todo list.