# Run Postman Test in CI with github actions

Postman has become a defacto tool for **API testing**. You can setup both functional and integration test with postman. These tests can be executed in your CI/CD pipeline and can help you to test for any breaking change or potential bug in your application.

> I will show you how you can run postman test  with github actions and you can even post results to slack.

## Step 1: Create your Postman Collection

Create your tests in Postman, I will not go into details of how to create tests in postman , you can read them from [Official Postman Documentation.](https://learning.postman.com/docs/writing-scripts/test-scripts/) 

## Step 2: Create Postman Key and Setup Slack

- Go to your Profile on Postman and Click on API. 

![Screen Shot 2022-05-28 at 10.53.04 AM.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1653756806910/oifxPaory.png align="left")

- Click Generate Postman  API Key 

![Screen Shot 2022-05-28 at 10.54.16 AM.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1653756902689/-hkkDHcgS.png align="left")

- Create  Slack Web hook URL

Go to Slack and create an incoming webhook to post test result. Slack provided [instructions here](https://api.slack.com/messaging/webhooks) and you can select the channel you want the message to be posted to.

- Get EnvironmentID and CollectionID from postman as shown below.

Open the environment and click information button to get EnvironmentID


![Screen Shot 2022-05-28 at 1.41.55 PM.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1653798447211/tZhTkz9nC.png align="left")

Open the  collection and get the collection ID too as shown below.

![Screen Shot 2022-05-28 at 10.24.06 PM.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1653798339548/WSNZ9XWh7.png align="left")

## Step 3: Add a Job in your github workflow to run the test.

Add the following Secrets to Github actions 

- POSTMAN_COLLECTION 
- POSTMAN_ENVIRONMENT
- SLACK_WEBHOOK
- POSTMAN_KEY

 
```
name: ci-test
'on':
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  postman-ci-test:
    name: Postman CI Test
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Install Node on runner
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: '14'

      - name: Install newman
        run: |
          npm install -g newman.    
          npm install -g newman-reporter-slackmsg
     
       - name: Run Test
        run: |
            newman run https://api.getpostman.com/collections/${{secrets.POSTMAN_COLLECTION}}
            apikey=${{secrets.POSTMAN_KEY}} \
          -e https://api.getpostman.com/environments/${{secrets.POSTMAN_ENVIRONMENT}}? 
           apikey=${{secrets.POSTMAN_KEY}} \
          -r slackmsg \
          --reporter-slackmsg-collection 'PostMan Test Collection-Go'  \
          --reporter-slackmsg-environment 'CI Env'  \
          --reporter-slackmsg-webhookurl ${{secrets.SLACK_WEBHOOK}} 

``` 

Let me explain what's going on here. We created a Job called *postman-ci-test* . This job has 
4 steps:

- *Check code*  - checkout the code of the repo
- * Install Node on runner* - install node because we need node.js on our runner to run newman
- *Install newman* - install newman and required reporter. 
- *Run Test* - executed the newman run command using the postman collection , environment and reporters.

You will see that we are retrieving the collection and environment  using Postman API  . You can also keep the collection and env json files in code if you like The downside to this is that you will need to export them again every-time you make changes to the collection or environment. 

If you set up everything correctly, once you push to trigger the CI, the test will run and send a notification to slack at the end of the test just like below.

 

![Screen Shot 2022-05-28 at 3.49.21 PM.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1653774595597/PLODm1BF_.png align="left")


I hope you enjoyed the tutorial. Drop your comments or questions for me and let me know if you need any help with your setup.
 
Connect with me on [Linkedin](https://linkedin.com/in/adesokanayo).