Postman Collections
By Postman
Postman Collections are organized, shareable groups of saved API requests within Postman, used to document, test, and automate calls to REST, GraphQL, and other APIs.
Definition
Postman Collections are organized, shareable groups of saved API requests within Postman, used to document, test, and automate calls to REST, GraphQL, and other APIs.
Overview
A Postman Collection is a structured folder of saved API requests within Postman, Postman's broader API client, letting teams group related endpoints — for example, all requests belonging to a single REST API — along with example responses, variables, and authentication settings. Collections make it easy to share a fully working set of API calls with teammates instead of re-explaining endpoints and parameters from scratch. Each request in a collection can include pre-request scripts and tests written in JavaScript, allowing teams to chain requests (using the output of one call as input to the next), validate responses automatically, and simulate multi-step workflows. Collections also support environment variables, so the same collection can be run against local, staging, and production environments by simply switching variable sets. Because collections are exportable as JSON, they double as a lightweight, human- and machine-readable form of API documentation, and can be run outside the Postman app via the Newman command-line tool — making them a common building block in CI/CD with GitHub Actions pipelines for automated API testing, alongside spec-based tools like Swagger/OpenAPI.
Key Features
- Organized folders of saved, shareable API requests
- Pre-request scripts and automated test assertions per request
- Environment variables for switching between dev, staging, and production
- Request chaining using variables extracted from prior responses
- Exportable/importable as JSON for sharing or version control
- Newman CLI runner for executing collections outside the Postman app
- Auto-generated documentation from collection contents
- Mock servers generated directly from a collection