Testing APIs means sending the same twenty requests over and over: the login call, the “list everything” call, the one that breaks every other Tuesday. Postman does the job, but these days it wants an account, a workspace and a cloud sync before it lets you send a GET. I just wanted my requests saved somewhere I can find them. So, yes, I wrote my own. Again.

Reqwing is a desktop HTTP client for Windows, macOS and Linux, built around bookmarks: every request you save keeps everything (method, URL, headers, body, options), and bookmarks live in nested folders you arrange by drag and drop. It’s built with Electron, React and SQLite, and it’s released under the MIT licence. No account, no cloud: your bookmarks sit in a single SQLite file on your machine.

What it does:

  • Bookmarks in nested folders: drag and drop, rename in place, duplicate, filter. A dot tells you when the open request differs from what’s saved
  • Import a whole API from a Swagger page: paste the address of a Swagger UI page or an OpenAPI description (or open a JSON/YAML file) and you get a folder with one bookmark per endpoint, grouped by tag, parameters and example bodies filled in
  • curl in, curl out: paste a curl command into the URL bar and it becomes the request, quotes and all. The Code tab shows any request as curl, fetch, Python or HTTPie, ready to copy
  • Every kind of body: multipart forms with files, URL-encoded forms, a raw file, or JSON/XML/HTML with syntax highlighting and a beautify button
  • HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 (ALPN, with a fallback), redirects with every hop listed, timeouts, gzip/deflate/br/zstd, and a switch to skip TLS verification for that one test server with a self-signed certificate
  • A timing breakdown for each response: DNS, TCP connect, TLS handshake, time to first byte, download. Plus the TLS version, cipher and the server’s certificate chain, handy when “it’s slow” lands on your desk
  • Requests leave from the app itself, not a browser page, so no CORS and no proxy in the way

The Windows installer uses a self-signed certificate, so SmartScreen will ask you to confirm the first time. On macOS, the app isn’t notarised by Apple. Either allow it under System Settings, Privacy & Security, or just do this:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Reqwing.app

Questions, bugs, ideas? There’s a Discord: https://discord.gg/6DFtaMyfRc.

Grab it here: https://reqwing.gradew.net. Happy requesting! :)