Authored by Derek Perez

Kong Insomnia’s 9.0 release, which shipped last week, integrates support for the Buf Schema Registry. Organizations adopting gRPC can now take advantage of Insomnia's rich feature set while keeping schema access simple and secure. Under the hood, this integration is powered by the BSR's new Reflection API — the first production-ready API for dynamic Protobuf schema access.

Insomnia integration is available now for all BSR users, so sign up for free (no credit card required) and try it out!

Using the BSR with Insomnia

Point your request at your BSR instance, provide it with your BSR API Token, and specify which Buf module contains your schemas.

Once configured, you can query the BSR for a list of available services and RPCs. Using the schemas provided by the BSR, Insomnia automatically converts binary requests and responses to and from human-readable JSON.

Buf's Reflection API vs. gRPC Server Reflection

gRPC server reflection is difficult to use at scale: it doesn't work in web browsers, encourages clients to implement bespoke caching logic, doesn't handle versioning across multiple projects, and doesn't have any built-in authentication or authorization mechanisms. It's fine for local development, but poorly designed for production workloads.

The Buf Reflection API solves these problems neatly. It relies on request-response RPCs that work well in browsers, uses standard HTTP caching directives, correctly handles projects using different versions of common dependencies, and uses BSR API tokens to manage authentication and authorization. For critical developer tools and dynamic schema access in production, the BSR Reflection API is the simpler, safer, and more robust choice.

What’s next?

We're always looking for new products and tools to integrate with, and we can’t wait to see else our community comes up with. Reach out to feedback@buf.build to share your ideas and feedback with us!