Insomnia 5.0 – The Biggest Release Yet!

TL;DR – This update brings contextual autocomplete, more authentication types, and better debugging! 👏

It's been over a month since the last release but version 5.0 is finally here! So, find a chair, take a seat, and brace yourself for what's about to come.

Now that you're prepared, let's dive into the new stuff.

Autocomplete, Everywhere 🚀

By far the biggest feature of 5.0 is the introduction of autocomplete. Now, just like your favourite code editor, Insomnia will suggest completions for common things like variable names, URLs, HTTP headers, and template tags.

Rendering Errors and Debugging 🚨

The new autocomplete system involved making some core changes to the rendering pipeline so, while that was happening, I spent some time improving the user experience around render errors.

The app now displays errors inline before the request is sent. That's right! No more wondering whether or not you typed in your variable name correctly. 😎

New libcurl Network Backend and Timeline 🏗

Curl is one of the most popular and feature-rich HTTP clients in the world and its command-line interface is often used for debugging and testing of APIs – making it a perfect fit for powering Insomnia's network stack.

Every network request made through Insomnia will now be sent using the libcurl C API. Using Curl not only improves Insomnia's reliability, but it also makes it possible to implement more advanced features like network throttling and download progress in the future (coming soon).

Thanks to libcurl, there is a new Timeline view that shows a debug log similar to the output when using Curl's --verbose flag. This is extremely valuable for debugging network problems when it's not clear exactly what's going wrong.

I would like to give a huge thanks to the maintainer of node-libcurl. Without this project, integrating Curl into Insomnia would have taken a lot more work.

OAuth 2.0, Digest, and NTLM Authentication 🔐

OAuth 2.0 is an extremely popular authentication mechanism, meaning Insomnia can now easily interact with many popular APIs like GitHub, Dropbox, Facebook, and Google. Simply fill out a few OAuth 2.0 parameters and Insomnia will take care of user authentication, generation of the Authorization header, and renewing refresh tokens when needed.

Insomnia supports all four OAuth 2.0 grant types so it should be able to handle anything you throw at it.

Along with OAuth 2.0, Insomnia now supports both Digest and NTLM (Windows) authentication.

Sortable Key-Value Editors ✊

If you like dragons, you'll love the new drag-n-drop sorting of Insomnia's key-value fields. Satisfy your inner perfectionist and sort your headers, query parameters, and form data whatever way you want!

Alright, this one isn't that exciting, but it was so heavily requested that it made sense to talk about it in this post.

So Much More 🍅🍇🍉🍌🍓

There is so much more that didn't make it into this post that I know you'll love. If you're curious you can view the full release notes, but here's a summary of the most notable ones missed:

• Environment variables and template tags now highlighted throughout the app
• Added per-request settings for controlling cookies, rendering, and URL encoding
• Digest and NTLM authentication now supported in proxy
• Custom HTTP methods now supported
• App panes now resizable when in vertical layout
• Response view types have been reworked to behave more intuitively

Thanks for the Support! 🍻

Almost all of the changes in version 5 are a direct result of the hundreds of email conversations I've had with users over the past year so "thank you!" and keep them email coming! 💌

Also, if you'd like to help support future development and get bonus features like cloud sync, check out Insomnia Plus.

🏃💨 Time to get started on the next big thing...

~ Gregory