Your First GET Request

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Enough theory — let's send something. This lesson walks through building your very first request in Postman: a plain GET against the RecipeBox /recipes endpoint, reading what comes back, and then narrowing the result down with a query parameter.

Step 1: Create a New Request

In Postman, click the + tab (or "New" → "HTTP Request") to open a blank request tab.
Leave the method dropdown on GET — it's the default, and it's what we want here.
Click into the URL bar and type:

GET https://api.recipebox.example.com/recipes

Click Send.

Step 2: Read the Response

The response panel below the request fills in with three things worth checking every single time, before you even look at the body:

Status: 200 OK — the request succeeded.
Time: something like 84 ms — how long the round trip took.
Size: the response payload size.

Then the body itself — since /recipes with no ID returns the whole list, the body is a JSON array of recipe objects, not a single object like the earlier examples:

// Response — 200 OK
[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "title": "Masala Chai",
    "category": "Beverage",
    "prepMinutes": 10,
    "isPublished": true
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "title": "Paneer Butter Masala",
    "category": "Dinner",
    "prepMinutes": 20,
    "isPublished": true
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "title": "Vegetable Biryani",
    "category": "Dinner",
    "prepMinutes": 45,
    "isPublished": false
  }
]

Note: Notice id: 3, Vegetable Biryani, has "isPublished": false. A real RecipeBox API would likely hide unpublished recipes from a public listing entirely, or only show them to the recipe's own author. If you ever see a draft recipe show up in a listing it shouldn't, that's exactly the kind of thing API testing catches that a UI test might not, since the mobile app's list screen might visually filter it out even though the raw API response leaked it.

Step 3: Narrow the Results with a Query Parameter

Now let's ask for only the Dinner recipes. You could type ?category=Dinner directly onto the end of the URL, but Postman gives you a friendlier way through the Params tab:

Click the Params tab, just below the URL bar.
In the empty row, type category under the Key column.
Type Dinner under the Value column.
Watch the URL bar — Postman automatically updates it to:

GET https://api.recipebox.example.com/recipes?category=Dinner

Click Send again.

The response is now filtered down to just the recipes whose category is "Dinner":

// Response — 200 OK
[
  {
    "id": 2,
    "title": "Paneer Butter Masala",
    "category": "Dinner",
    "prepMinutes": 20,
    "isPublished": true
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "title": "Vegetable Biryani",
    "category": "Dinner",
    "prepMinutes": 45,
    "isPublished": false
  }
]

Worth trying yourself: what happens if you send ?category=Lunch and no recipe has that category — do you get an empty array [] with 200, or does the API respond with 404? Both are defensible designs, but only one matches what this particular API's documentation promises — and that's exactly the kind of question a good tester asks rather than assumes.

Up next: Reading data is only half the picture. Head to POST, PUT & DELETE Requests to start creating, replacing, and removing recipes.

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