Seamless Collaboration With Bruno's Git UI

Bruno's superpower is the ability to natively synchronize, access, and work with collections via Git.

Although other API clients are touted as 'collaboration platforms', none have truly solved the problem of collaboration at scale. It's not their fault though, because structuring a system where hundreds or thousands of teams or users can be accessing, changing, and updating files is extremely hard. Call us lazy, but this is a primary driver of  why Bruno relies on a system that has already been the defacto standard for developer collaboration for years :) .

That said, not everyone using other API clients is intimately familiar with Git, and working through the command line can be a double-edged sword: immensely powerful yet often challenging to navigate.

This is where Bruno’s Git UI comes in—enabling seamless collaboration through an intuitive, visual approach.

Consuming a Collection (Cloning a Repo)

Importing or otherwise accessing someone else's collection is the primary starting point for many API client users. In Bruno, you can import many different collection formats, but to have real and versioned collaboration - what you really want to do is clone a Git repository. 

While you can clone a repo through the command line, Bruno makes it easy by allowing you to simply use a link to a repo. All you need to do is:

1. Select Import Collection

2. Click Clone a Git Repository

3. Enter the URL of the repository, the location you'd like the collection to be saved, and click Clone

Bruno will then clone the repo and identify any collections that can be imported. Since this repo only contains a single collection, we only see one option. 

Once selecting Open we now have the collection visible inside of Bruno, but still connected to Git. Easy! 

Viewing the Collection in the Git UI

You can view more details about the collection inside of the Git UI, including the:

• Readme
• Commit history
• Tags
• Changes

Access this view by selecting the branch you are on and clicking Git UI. 

A new tab will open where you can view all of these items:

All of this data is exactly as you would see it either within your Git provider (in this case GitHub), or directly through the filesystem or terminal. 

Pulling Changes for the Collection 

Checking for changes to a collection is just the click of a button away. Simply select the branch you are on, and click Pull. 

And Voila! Your collection is now updated with the changes. 

If you want to see the previous commits, you can head to the Commits tab and view the history:

Advanced Actions 

For those familiar with Git and actively changing/updating collections, you'll find there are other standard Git operations enabled through the UI. 

You have the ability to:

• Add Remotes 
• Create Branches
• Checkout Branches
• Make Commits
• Push changes 

Wrap Up 

This was a brief introductory view into Bruno's capability with Git that hopefully shows the true collaboration that's possible when you use a standardized process versus a proprietary cloud "Workspace" that lacks the necessary control and structure to properly collaborate and version collections. 

We're constantly adding more capability to our Git UI functionality, but this should allow for a well-rounded experience without having to leave Bruno frequently. If you have any requests or feedback, feel free to reach out on Discord or create a feature request on Github.