Bruno For Linux

Changing the norm (or the status quo, if you will) is almost always not as simple as inspirational/motivational movies make it out to be. Quite often, aiming to change something that's considered to be the meta and the norm ends up in failure. However, sometimes success stories are born, and they have the power to inspire.

Bruno is (in my eyes, at least) one such success story. What is Bruno? A super sleek and modern API client that's also Git-friendly (more on that a bit later).

Bruno's mission is to revolutionize "the status quo represented by Postman, Insomnia, and other similar tools." Considering just how success and well-established the tools in questions are, it might seem that Bruno is not a valid contender, right?

Well, not really. The thing that makes Bruno special is the concepts that power it, namely open-source (it's community driven, code released under MIT), privacy (everything is stored locally), and transparency (well, you'll have to do some reading about this, but a good place to start is here).

Bruno uses a plain text markup language (called Bru) to save information about API requests, it stores all your collections (collections are used to organize tested APIs), it allows for Git for collaboration (but you can use any other system of the sorts).

Even though Bruno makes a strong case for itself, as expected, it's not perfect. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't "fall on its face," but one of its biggest advantages is also one of its biggest disadvantages. I am talking, of course, about the fact that Bruno doesn't have a cloud sync option (which is cool, the whole point of the tool is to offer uncompromising privacy and freedom).

However, most other API clients (probably all of them, actually) such as Postman, Insomnia, Paw, Hoppscotch, Httpie feature cloud sync. Hence, this feature alone will make Bruno perfect for some people, while making it totally unusable for others.

Oh, last but not least, there's no getting around the fact that Bruno is made using Electron. I think it's somewhat easy to confuse fast and easy-to-use (which Bruno is) with lightweight (which Bruno isn't). Sure, modern computers will have absolutely no issue running it, but I thought it's worth pointing out.

Another interesting aspect of Bruno is that it features three editions. There's the Opensource edition that provides the bulk of basic features such as support for REST and CQL API, scripting, authentication, proxies, code generation, documentation, BRU CLI, and OpenAPI imports, among others.

The Golden edition requires a one-time payment and adds advanced features such as a built-in Bru File Explorer, Visual Git, GRPC, Websocket, SocketIO, MQTT, performance and load testing, various developer tools, OpenAPI Designer, terminals, and various custom themes. I have to also point out that all modules belonging to the Golden edition are not open-source (they're closed). The last edition is very similar to the Golden edition, but it's more geared towards organizations.

As with all projects of this sort, there's no way of telling what the future holds in store for Bruno, but the way Bruno came to be and the principles that drive it make for a compelling case. So much so, that it's not surprising that I'm rooting for its success, even though I do not need an API client.