Thunder Client

Thunder Client is a GUI based Rest API Client Extension for Visual Studio Code, hand-crafted by Ranga Vadhineni with simple and clean design. The source code is not open source. You can report any Bugs Or Feature requests here.

• Voted as #10 Product of the day on Product Hunt
• Website - www.thunderclient.io
• Follow Us for updates - Twitter, LinkedIn

Story behind Thunder Client

• Read Launch Blog Post on Medium

Review

• If you like this extension, please leave a review or rating on VS Code Marketplace, will be useful for new users.

Menu

• How to Use
• Tech
• Features
• Import/Export
• Run Collection
• Scriptless Testing
• Contribution
• Privacy

How to Use

• Install the Extension, Click Thunder Client icon on the Action Bar.
• From Command Palette (Cm+Sh+P) type thunder and select Thunder Client: New Request
• Video: youtube.com/watch?v=NKZ0ahNbmak

Tech

• Thunder Client is built with Javascript, Flexbox, Typescript, Ace Editor, Got, Nedb. No javascript or bootstrap frameworks used.

Features

• Send http/https API request using any of the methods GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, HEAD and OPTIONS.
• The Response data supports syntax hightlighting using ACE Editor which can handle large responses easily, you can also view response in Full Screen
• History, Collections and Environment Tabs in the Action Bar View for quick access.
• Authentication: Basic Auth, Bearer Token and OAuth 2.0 are supported.
• Headers: You can send http headers to test api, with auto-complete support.
• Post Body: Send post body as Text, Json, Xml, Form Data and Form-Url-Encoded.
• Graphql: Send Graphql Query & Variables has syntax highlighting support.
• Environment Variables: Syntax highlighting support for environment variables just use {{variable}} syntax in most fields
• Scriptless Testing: Test APIs with GUI based functionality, no scripting knowledge needed.
• Themes: The extension also supports VS Code themes.

Import/Export

• You can import or export Thunder Client collections data, useful to share with team mates.
• Currently you can import collection or Environment file from Postman also. ( other file formats support soon.. ).
• Submit PR for other file formats on https://github.com/rangav/thunder-imports

Run Collection

• You can test multiple requests using Collection, select Run All option from the collection menu.
• The collection runner will execute all requests and test cases and display the result.

Scriptless Testing

• I noticed we need to write lot of boilerplate code in Postman and other clients to do basic testing using scripting like status code equal 200. So I implemented GUI based tests, where you select couple of dropdowns to do most standard tests very easily without any scripting knowledge.
• Set Environment Variable from tests tab is now supported, follow below steps
  • Create Env and the required variable name with empty value
  • From the tests tab select Set Env Variable option and enter the json property
  • In value input enter the variable name when its matches name in Env, it will turn green
  • Now execute the request you will see the variable value set in the Env.

Contribution Guidelines

• As the project is not open source, when you submit feature request or bug, if you know the solution, please submit code sample or a sample project in node or .Net, so it will be faster for me to integrate into main project.

Privacy

• Basic anonymised telemetry data of extension usage is collected using vscode-extension-telemetry, No Personal or request data is collected. You can opt out using VS Code Settings details here
• There is no backend or cloud sync currently, all the data is stored locally on your computer.