Hello Hackers! I'm Bartosz, a dev from Poland. Helena is an API client I built because I wanted something Postman-shaped that is a single native binary: no Electron, no account, no telemetry, collections stored as plain YAML you can commit to git, heavily inspired by Bruno.
A few things I think are interesting technically:
* It's Go + Fyne, rendered via OpenGL. One ~35 MB self-contained binary per platform.
* Collections are Open Collection YAML on disk, but auth secrets and secret env vars are externalized to a store under your config dir, so a committed collection never contains cleartext credentials.
* Nine auth schemes (OAuth2 with PKCE, OAuth 1.0a, AWS SigV4, NTLM, Digest, WSSE, ...), request chaining with {{chain.alias.response.json.path}} templates, pre/post JS hooks via goja, and SSE/WebSocket support hand-rolled on the standard library.
* helena run executes a whole collection headlessly with JSON or JUnit output, so the same collection doubles as a CI test suite.
Honest caveats: macOS binaries are built in CI but not yet signed (I do not have a MacBook to properly test), the secrets store is plaintext on disk for now (OS keychain integration is planned), and Fyne has its own look that isn't for everyone.
Using Helena on daily basis with in my work as backend dev.
Yes, done with massive help from AI, I am a dad working 9-5 so this is mostly a pet/hobby project. Started as an investigation of where are we with GUI tools for Go.
A few things I think are interesting technically:
* It's Go + Fyne, rendered via OpenGL. One ~35 MB self-contained binary per platform. * Collections are Open Collection YAML on disk, but auth secrets and secret env vars are externalized to a store under your config dir, so a committed collection never contains cleartext credentials. * Nine auth schemes (OAuth2 with PKCE, OAuth 1.0a, AWS SigV4, NTLM, Digest, WSSE, ...), request chaining with {{chain.alias.response.json.path}} templates, pre/post JS hooks via goja, and SSE/WebSocket support hand-rolled on the standard library. * helena run executes a whole collection headlessly with JSON or JUnit output, so the same collection doubles as a CI test suite.
Honest caveats: macOS binaries are built in CI but not yet signed (I do not have a MacBook to properly test), the secrets store is plaintext on disk for now (OS keychain integration is planned), and Fyne has its own look that isn't for everyone.
Repo: https://github.com/ideaconnect/helena - would love feedback.
Using Helena on daily basis with in my work as backend dev.
Yes, done with massive help from AI, I am a dad working 9-5 so this is mostly a pet/hobby project. Started as an investigation of where are we with GUI tools for Go.
The main component which displays requests and responses is a library itself too: https://github.com/ideaconnect/go-fyne-pretty-view