Practice Exercises

You have read about Newman. Now you use it. These exercises go from beginner to CI/CD. Do them in order. By the end, you will have a fully automated API test pipeline running from the command line.

Exercise 1: Install and First Run

Exercise 2: Environments in Newman

Create two environments in Postman — "Dev" with baseUrl = https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com and "ReqRes" with baseUrl = https://reqres.in/api. Update your collection to use {{baseUrl}} in all requests. Export both environments. Run Newman with each:

# Run with Dev environment
newman run collection.json -e dev.json

# Run with ReqRes environment
newman run collection.json -e reqres.json

# Both should run — responses will differ but structure works

Exercise 3: HTML Report

Install the htmlextra reporter. Run your collection and generate an HTML report. Open it in your browser. Explore the report — look at request/response details, failed tests, timing charts.

npm install -g newman-reporter-htmlextra

newman run collection.json \
  -e dev.json \
  -r htmlextra \
  --reporter-htmlextra-export report.html

open report.html

Exercise 4: Data-Driven Newman Run

Create a CSV file with 5 user IDs (1-5). Create a GET request to {{baseUrl}}/users/{{userId}} with assertions. Run Newman with the data file. Check that all 5 iterations pass.

userId,expectedName
1,Leanne Graham
2,Ervin Howell
3,Clementine Bauch
4,Patricia Lebsack
5,Chelsey Dietrich

newman run collection.json \
  -e dev.json \
  -d exercise4-data.csv \
  -r cli,htmlextra \
  --reporter-htmlextra-export data-driven-report.html

Exercise 5: npm Scripts and CI Simulation

Create a project with package.json. Install Newman locally. Add npm scripts for test:dev, test:staging, and test:ci. Run each one. This simulates what happens in a real CI/CD pipeline.

# Initialize project
mkdir api-tests && cd api-tests
npm init -y
npm install --save-dev newman newman-reporter-htmlextra

# Copy your collection, environment, and data files into the project
mkdir collections environments data reports

# Add scripts to package.json (edit manually)
# Then run:
npx newman run collections/your-collection.json -e environments/dev.json

Exercise 6: Advanced Flags

Try each of these flags with your collection and observe the difference:

1. Run with --bail — intentionally break one test and see it stop early
2. Run with --delay-request 2000 — notice the slower execution
3. Run with --timeout-request 100 — see requests timeout (100ms is too short)
4. Run with --folder and a specific folder name from your collection
5. Run with --suppress-exit-code — break a test and check echo $? is still 0