Owlpost

**The problem:** Testing gRPC and Protobuf-based APIs is painful compared to REST. Most API clients (Postman, Insomnia, etc.) were built REST-first, so gRPC support is either missing or bolted on as an afterthought. Backend engineers end up falling back to grpcurl in a terminal — manually constructing JSON payloads, guessing at message structures, and decoding raw wire-format responses by hand. There's no visual, schema-aware way to explore and test gRPC services the way you can with REST endpoints in a typical API tool. **How owlpost solves it:** owlpost is a desktop API client built specifically around gRPC and Protocol Buffers, not REST with gRPC support tacked on. You register your `.proto` files once, and owlpost automatically discovers every service and method defined in the schema — no manual endpoint setup. The request editor is schema-aware: it renders enums as dropdowns, handles oneofs correctly, gives you an editable format for timestamps, and lets you build deeply nested messages visually instead of hand-writing raw JSON. Responses come back fully decoded and human-readable. owlpost also natively supports all four gRPC communication patterns — unary, server-streaming, client-streaming, and bidirectional streaming — which most general-purpose API tools don't handle at all. Because real backend work isn't purely gRPC, owlpost also supports standard HTTP/HTTPS requests with JSON bodies, so engineers can manage both protocols in one tool instead of switching between apps. Built-in environment and variable management makes it easy to move between local, staging, and production without rewriting requests each time. Under the hood, owlpost is an Electron app (macOS) with a Go sidecar handling the gRPC transport layer, keeping things fast and reliable even with large payloads or long-lived streams.

Discussion (0)