Introducing Insomnia Designer: An Open Source Collaborative Editor for API Design

Read the latest version: Announcing Insomnia 2021.1

Archived post below.

Today, we're thrilled to announce the release of a major expansion to the Insomnia family of open source developer tools — Insomnia Designer! Providing a collaborative environment for editing GraphQL and REST APIs, Insomnia Designer allows developer teams to more easily embrace spec-first approaches to software design.

Last fall, Kong acquired Insomnia because the Insomnia team shared our commitment to helping developers build the next generation of software and our passion for open source. Now, we are proud to be doubling down on Insomnia by providing the developer community with design tools created to help them go faster and farther in creating new REST and GraphQL APIs.

With software increasingly being run as loosely coupled microservices, APIs have emerged as first-class citizens. In this new paradigm, developers need tools that were built to help them adopt and adapt to distributed architectures while simultaneously improving quality and velocity.

Unlike other API editing tools, Insomnia Designer was created to allow users to build workflows that mimic the way that their teams work together. Insomnia Designer was built from the ground up with DevOps, CI/CD and GitOps best practices in mind. With the ability to automatically generate declarative configurations for Kubernetes and Kong, Insomnia Designer automates tedious processes and minimizes risk of configuration drift.

To increase visibility and collaboration, Insomnia Designer provides a Document Listing that enables easy discovery and management of API specs. Providing at-a-glance details for API designs as well as their entire Git history, users can ensure appropriate version control for all of their REST and GraphQL API spec files.

Beyond ease-of-use, Insomnia Designer also provides a robust integration with the broader Kong platform. Using Insomnia Plugins, users can automatically embed Kong Gateway policies directly into their API specification files within the Insomnia Designer UI. This allows developers to store their Kong Gateway policies within the specification itself. By selecting Kong Plugins for capabilities such as authentication or rate-limiting, users can easily input policies that govern their API's behavior directly into their code. Through configuring the gateway and deploying a documentation site from a single source of truth instead of multiple disjointed ones that follow different Design, Development, and QA processes, users can more easily detect issues before they impact production.

To dig in more about the features, check out Insomnia Creator Greg Schier's blog or download to get started today!