Kong Insomnia 8.3 Brings Back Local Projects
With Kong Insomnia 8.3 (available today) we’ve brought back 100% local storage with no cloud synchronization for your projects, while at the same time keeping the same workflow for users who want to collaborate in the cloud. To start using Local Vault, get started for free with Insomnia.
This means that now Kong Insomnia supports:
- Cloud Sync: e2ee cloud synchronization for collaboration.
- Local Vault: local storage for all files in a project.
- Git Sync: using a third-party Git repository for storage (this doesn't require cloud access and never did).
By supporting all three options, I believe this makes Kong Insomnia the most comprehensive solution for API development and debugging and can cater to pretty much every use case.
Migrating from pre-8.x to 8.3+ will also now default to migrating to Local Vault, while still showing the optional Cloud Sync for users that want to collaborate together. This is to avoid the situation where someone mistakenly transfers projects to the cloud if they are not allowed to do so by their employer.
Account management is still done in the cloud on insomnia.rest: projects under Local Vault and Git Sync are not stored in the cloud even when creating an account, which is used for managing collaborators for any cloud projects that you may have now or in the future, for managing organizations and their users, for managing billing and upgrades, and so on. More cloud features will be shipped in the future that will be managed via the cloud website as well.
Scratch Pad is still there and is local by default and does not require an account.
Here’s a video that shows how to convert a Cloud Sync project to Local Vault and vice-versa: https://www.loom.com/share/ca2e859698d54e58a871c33da570213f
Local Vault and Cloud Sync
You can now create local projects in addition to cloud projects, and even have a mix of both. If you have a cloud project today and want to convert it to a local project, you can click on the "Project Settings" and make that change.
When a project is created locally or converted to be local-only, all data in the cloud is permanently deleted. Alternatively, when a local project grows to a point where cloud collaboration is needed, it can also be converted to Cloud Sync with the same process. Moving back and forth is super easy.
Both project types (Cloud and Local) can be enabled to support Git Sync if you wish to do so, which always uses a third-party repository for storing data and never goes to the cloud.
What happens when a project is local?
When creating a local project or converting a cloud project to become local, we apply the following behavior:
- Local projects have their data permanently deleted from the cloud, even if they had Cloud Sync enabled previously. Of course, projects that are local since day one never use the cloud to begin with.
- Local projects that become cloud projects are end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) and stored in the cloud to enable collaboration.
- It is not possible to collaborate on local projects (given that we wouldn't have a way to do that anymore) unless Git Sync is enabled.
- Only organization "Owners" and "Admins" can perform project conversions from/to the cloud.
- When a cloud project becomes local, collaborators working on that project will also see a local project moving forward (it becomes Local for everybody). The opposite happens when a local project becomes a cloud project, and now collaborators can access it remotely.
- When using Git Sync, the data is always stored in the third-party Git repository of your choice and never goes to the cloud. This has always been the case with Insomnia 8.x.
Making it right for the community
We’re going to continue to work to make this right for the Insomnia community.
This whole experience highlighted some misunderstandings on my part that led to the 8.x changes — and it’s been a huge learning opportunity for me.
We learned after releasing Insomnia 8.0 that for many users using cloud storage for projects (encrypted or not) is simply not an option.
I now understand the importance of having a local-only storage option for projects that for one reason or another cannot be moved to the cloud, and I’m fully leaning into local storage as one of the three storage backends we will support in the future.
Storage flexibility and freedom
With Kong Insomnia 8.3+, you can freely choose between all storage options (Cloud, Local or Git), based on your requirements and preferences.
We hope with this release the community will see we’ve worked quickly to respond to user feedback — and provided a way for users to delete data permanently from the cloud if needed or desired — all while striking a balance that allows us to also cater to those users who want more cloud collaboration features.
What’s next?
Kong Insomnia is a profoundly vast product that covers many areas of the API lifecycle: supporting API creation, debugging, testing, an ecosystem of plugins, a CLI, collaboration capabilities, and more.
It is a growing product that requires continued investment to keep delivering awesome features to the community and our customers.
My job is to make sure that as we keep working on Insomnia, we set the product on a path to success. The engineering and support teams will be doubled again within the next 12 months, and we plan to invest more into:
- Supporting all community features, like pre-post request scripting, collections runs, multiple tabs, and more.
- Improving the user experience and fixing all bugs that have been reported.
- Establish a strong community and technical support function that can unblock users in their day-to-day obstacles.
- Being the best and most cost-effective product at scale for both individual users and large organizations.
With Insomnia 8.3 and above, I want to set a new course for the project that is sustainable and exciting. We’ll continue building innovation and features that you can use in the cloud, locally, and with Git.
Local storage is here to stay
We’re fully leaning into local storage as part of our roadmap as we now see this was an underserved use case and an opportunity for the project:
- We’ll build more capabilities around controlling where data is stored, and allow the owner of an organization to remotely de-provision local data for users who should not have access to it anymore. And with that, all-local API credentials too.
- We’ll add management capabilities to mandate projects to only be Local (or Cloud, or Git) for all collaborators or employees of an organization that can be set up from the cloud organization admin panel. And more.
- We’ll also fully pursue SOC 2 compliance (and more) for Insomnia, so that users can have the peace of mind that when data is stored in the cloud, it’s also secure and end-to-end encrypted and you can freely collaborate on your API projects without complex import/export flows that don't scale.
There will be more 8.x releases coming soon as we keep improving the product. And you will always have access to your local projects across every future update. To start using Local Vault, get started for free with Insomnia today.
