Allow import/refresh of OpenAPI spec from URL

[ccleve]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In the Designer you can start with an OpenAPI file on disk. My OpenAPI spec gets generated dynamically in my JAX-RS app. You go to http://localhost:8081/api/openapi to get it.

When I make an API change in my app I have to regenerate the file, save it to disk and re-import it into Designer. This is a headache.

Describe the solution you'd like
It would be better if Designer just kept a reference to the URL and would let me refresh it by hitting a button.

Then I could go to the debug page and test endpoints easily.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[johnlewiskalahari]

This seems like an odd thing to leave for a year and then close. I was under the impression that Insomia was some sort of alternative to Postman, but seeing you can even import an OpeAPI spec from an URL, perhaps it's a dead project?

[wdawson]

Hi John, sorry for the confusion. This isn't closed. We had an overaggressive stale bot last year. We also moved a lot of ideas from Issues to Discussions to better facilitate discussions like this. I've been having a lot of discussions recently about the sources that we want to be able to use in Insomnia (like git, files, and URLs). So thank you for chiming in here. I don't have any details yet on when we'd support this, but I'm curious if you have the same use case as above; namely, using it with local development of a server.

[lwestfall]

I'm not the person you replied to last, but I'm in the same boat - I'd love to be able to refresh my collection from an openapi url. I do have the same use-case (for testing in local development)

[dbeg]

Similar to @ccleve, I too couple OpenAPI spec files to my web apps and expose them as resources within the API itself. I've found that this is useful for not just local development, but maintaining OpenAPI specification files for actual production APIs as well.

My workflow is such that I make use of Insomnia's "IMPORT FROM -> URL" functionality, and also find that it's tedious to re-import API changes into Insomnia when an OpenAPI spec is updated (it's rather troublesome, as one must seemingly create a new request collection or design document, this is especially tedious if many environments/variables have been configured).

Having the ability to simply refresh a request collection from its URL source would be nice (perhaps this is only true if Insomnia environments and variables would be retained), but I could see how this feature might be a headache to implement (given the situation of breaking API changes in the update spec) but perhaps a simple solution to this is making it a request collection configuration option and quite loudly expressing to the user that updating the request collection by URL will overwrite existing changes within Insomnia (e.g. Requests might be added or removed).

[TheCataliasTNT2k]

Would be great to have this!

[unkindypie]

Would be a really useful feature

[seevai]

Would be a really useful feature

[danhstevens]

I moved to another API solution because of a lack of this feature. Not sure how you're supposed to develop APIs if you can't refresh your specs without great effort.