Newman

Newman is a command-line collection runner for Postman. It allows you to effortlessly run and test a Postman collection directly from the command-line. It is built with extensibility in mind so that you can easily integrate it with your continuous integration servers and build systems.

Newman maintains feature parity with Postman and allows you to run collections just the way they are executed inside the collection runner in Postman.

Getting Started

Newman is built on Node.js. To run Newman, make sure you have Node.js installed. Node.js can be downloaded and installed from here on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.

With that done, Newman is just one command away.

$ npm install -g newman

This installs Newman from npm globally on your system allowing you to run it from anywhere.

If you already have Newman, you can update with a simple command

$ npm update -g newman

The easiest way to run Newman is to run it with a collection. With the -c flag you can run any collection file lying on your file-system. Refer the collection documentation to learn how to use and download collections.

$ newman -c mycollection.json

The -u flag allows you to pass a postman collection as a URL. Your collection probably uses environment variables. To provide an accompanying set of environment variables, export them from Postman and run them with the -e flag.

$ newman -u https://www.getpostman.com/collections/cb208e7e64056f5294e5 -e devenvironment.json

Options

Newman provides a rich set of options to customize a run. A list of options can be retrieved by running it with the -h flag.

$ newman -h

Options:

-h, --help                output usage information
-V, --version             output the version number
-c, --collection [file]   Specify a Postman collection as a JSON [file]
-u, --url [url]           Specify a Postman collection as a [url]
-f, --folder [folderName] Specify a single folder to run from a collection. To be used with -c or -u.
-e, --environment [file]  Specify a Postman environment as a JSON [file]
-d, --data [file]         Specify a data file to use either json or csv
-g, --global [file]       Specify a Postman globals file as JSON [file]
-s, --stopOnError         Stops the runner when a test case fails
-n, --number [number]     Define the number of iterations to run.
-o, --outputFile [file]   Path to file where output should be written. [file]
-C, --noColor             Disable colored output.

Use the -n option to set the number of iterations you want to run the collection for.

$ newman -c mycollection.json -n 10  # runs the collection 10 times

To provide a different set of data i.e. variables for each iteration you can use the -d to specify a json or csv file. For example, a data file such as the one shown below will run 2 iterations, with each iteration using a set of variables.

[{
	"url": "http://127.0.0.1:5000",
	"user_id": "1",
	"id": "1",
	"token_id": "123123",
},
{
	"url": "http://dump.getpostman.com",
	"user_id": "2",
	"id": "2",
	"token_id": "899899",
}]

$ newman -c mycollection.json -d data.json

The csv file for the above set of variables would look like

url, user_id, id, token_id
http://127.0.0.1:5000, 1, 1, 123123123
http://dump.getpostman.com, 2, 2, 899899

Newman, by default exits with a status code of 0 if everything runs well i.e. without any exceptions. Continuous integration tools respond to these exit codes and correspondingly pass or fail a build. You can use -s flag to tell Newman to halt on a test case error with a status code of 1 which can then be picked up by a CI tool or build system.

$ newman -c PostmanCollection.json -e environment.json -s

Iteration 1 of 1
200 17ms Blog posts http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog/posts
    ✔ Status code is 200
404 5ms Blog post http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog/posts/1
200 4ms New post without token http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog/posts
    ✔ Body has a message
    ✔ invalid credentials
Test case failed: Status code is 404

The results of all tests and requests can be exported into file and later imported in Postman for further analysis. Use the -o flag and a file name to save the runner output into a file.

$ newman -c mycollection.json -o outputfile.json

NOTE Newman allows you to use all libraries that Postman supports for running tests. For x2js however, only function xmlToJson is supported.

Library

Newman has been built as a library from the ground-up so that it can be extended and put to varied uses. You can use it like so -

var Newman = require('newman');

// read the collectionjson file
var collectionJson = JSON5.parse(fs.readFileSync("collection.json", 'utf8'));

// define Newman options
newmanOptions = {
	envJson: JSON5.parse(fs.readFileSync("envjson.json", "utf-8")), // environment file (in parsed json format)
	dataFile: data.csv,                    // data file if required
	iterationCount: 10,                    // define the number of times the runner should run
	outputFile: "outfile.json",            // the file to export to
	responseHandler: "TestResponseHandler", // the response handler to use
	asLibrary: true,         				// this makes sure the exit code is returned as an argument to the callback function
	stopOnError: true
}

// Optional Callback function which will be executed once Newman is done executing all its tasks.
Newman.execute(collectionJson, newmanOptions, callback);

Cron

Want your test suite to run every hour? Newman can be used to schedule tests to run hourly, daily or weekly automatically in combination with the awesome Unix scheduler CRON.

Lets setup a simple script called run_newman to run our tests

#!/bin/bash

timestamp=$(date +"%s") 
collection=/var/www/myapp/tests/collection.json
env=/var/www/myapp/tests/envfile.json

# create separate outfile for each run
outfile=/var/www/myapp/tests/outfile-$timestamp.json

# redirect all output to /dev/null
newman -c $collection -c $env -o $outfile > /dev/null2>&1

Make it an executable

$ chmod +x run_newman

To run Newman every hour, run crontab -e and enter the following -

0 * * * * /path/to/run_newman

Check your cron if it has been setup

$ crontab -l
0 * * * * /path/to/run_newman

With this, your Newman is set to run automatically every hour.

Note: Exact location for cron is dependent on the linux distribution you are running. See specific cron instructions for your distribution. For an introduction to cron checkout this article.

License

Apache. See the LICENSE file for more information