What is Requestly?

Requestly is an Open-Source frontend development platform with essential tooling & integrations that helps frontend developers write, test & debug their code 10x faster. For a frontend developer, there is a lot of dependency on backend devs for building/updating the APIs, dependency on environment for end-to-end testing of the feature (e.g. checkout flow), and sometimes dependency on clients especially if the code is deployed on client’s website. For debugging an issue, without having information like console logs, network logs makes it harder for them to reproduce the issue.

Requestly (available as browser extension and desktop app) acts as local proxy on the device and enables frontend developers to reduce their dependency on backend devs, bypass environment complexity and provides complete control on network layer to inspect, capture & modify https requests & responses.

👉 Problems that Requestly solves

• Build features when backend API is not ready
• Testing, Validating and Mocking API responses
• Testing code changes directly on production sites without deployment cycles
• Stress testing of application
• Faster bug reporting and debugging using Requestly sessions

👉 Building frontend features when backend (APIs) is not ready (Using API Mock Server)

Requestly comes with an in-built API Mock server that can be used to quickly create Mock API endpoints. You can simply define the API response you need with additional capabilities like latency, status code, method, etc.

API Mock Server can be used in Private Workspace as well as Team Workspace.

👉 Testing, Validating and Mocking API responses (Using API Client)

There’s an inbuilt API Client that developers can use to quickly check API responses. Requestly API client comes with all the features a frontend developers require to test & validate API responses.

In addition to what most API clients offer, Requestly can be used to define a new/different response for an existing API endpoint using Modify Response rule. This is particularly helpful to when you need a different API response for the same endpoint.

👉 Testing code changes directly on production without deployment cycles (Using Redirect Rule)

As a frontend developer, your heavily work on JS code and want to test your changes across the app but It is quite infeasible to have the entire app and its backend running on local machine so in order to test the code, deployment to staging/production environment is required which typically take somewhere between 5-10mins.

In order to do this, you can set up a Redirect Rule under HTTP Rules section and setup a redirect from production URL with the local development URL of the script. When you open the production site, browser will swap the production script with the script running on your local machine.

This is a very powerful technique and can save you ~1h everyday.

👉 Stress Testing of App

As a frontend developer, you’d want to test your app for all negative code flows and error paths. Since most of the scenarios are backend driven and logic is governed at backend, in order to test for different flows or error scenarios, you’d want to test against different API responses and configurations.

Requestly Modify Response rule makes it really easy to configure scenarios like

• Bad API responses
• Big response
• Simulating additional latency
• API failures by simulating HTTP status code

👉 Faster Bug Reporting & Debugging (Using Requestly Sessions)

Requestly makes it really easy to share browsing session along with a bug report and developers can use the video, console logs, network logs, env details to setup HTTP rules like simulating API response from the session and reproduce the issue faster.

👉 Faster Collaboration using Team Workspace

Requestly provides multiple ways to collaborate with your team mates be it generating a one-time link and sharing. The most used option is team workspace. You can invite your team mates and use Requestly together for any Mock API endpoints, HTTP Rules, edge case scenarios, & sessions.

Conclusion

Requestly is an open-source frontend development platform used by 190000+ developers around the globe in more than 6000 organizations. Our mission is to help companies ship quality software faster and we do this by enabling frontend developers to write, test & debug 10x faster. Join us in our mission by leveraging Requestly in your development workflow or contributing to our open-source project on Github.