Import & Export

Mercury imports Postman and Insomnia exports and cURL commands, and it can copy any request as a cURL command.

Where imports go

Choose Import from Postman… or Import from Insomnia… from the workspace menu in the top bar. The empty sidebar also has Import from ... links. Pick the export file, and then:

• if a workspace is open, the requests are written into that workspace
• if no workspace is open, Mercury asks for a folder to write to, then opens it as the workspace

A notification reports how many requests and environments were imported.

File and folder names are sanitized: they're lowercased, and spaces and characters such as / \ : * ? " < > | become -. For example, "Get User" becomes get-user.json. Existing files with the same name are overwritten.

Postman

Export the collection from Postman as Collection v2.1 (JSON).

Postman	Mercury
Request	<name>.json
Folder (any depth)	Folder, with the same nesting
Collection variables	.env.<collection-name> in the import folder
Headers	Headers (disabled ones are skipped)
Raw body	Body
URL-encoded body	A Form body, with the matching Content-Type
Bearer / Basic / API key auth	The Authorization (or API key) header, or a query parameter
URL	The raw URL. Without one, the URL is rebuilt from its parts, skipping disabled query params.

Auth set on the collection or a folder applies to every request under it, and a request's own auth wins over it.

Postman {{variables}} stay as they are in URLs, headers and bodies, so they work with the generated .env file. Scripts and tests aren't imported.

What Mercury can't express is named in the notification rather than dropped quietly: OAuth 2 and other token-exchange auth, form-data and binary bodies, which need a file a request file cannot point at, and GraphQL bodies. Anything listed there needs finishing by hand on the Auth tab or the Body tab.

Example: importing a collection named "My API":

workspace/
├── .env.my-api
├── auth/
│   └── login.json
├── users/
│   └── admin/
│       └── list-admins.json
└── health-check.json

Insomnia

Export from Insomnia as JSON or YAML.

Insomnia	Mercury
Request inside a request group	<group-name>/<name>.json
Request not in a group	imported/<name>.json
Environment (non-empty)	.env.<environment-name>
Headers	Headers (disabled ones are skipped)
Body text	Body

Each request goes into a folder named after its direct parent group. Nested groups aren't recreated as nested folders. Auth settings aren't imported.

workspace/
├── .env.base-environment
├── users/
│   ├── get-user.json
│   └── list-users.json
└── imported/
    └── health.json

Import from cURL

Paste a command that starts with curl into the URL bar. Mercury parses it and replaces the method, URL, headers and body. This works with commands copied from browser DevTools or API docs, including multi-line commands that use \ continuations.

curl -X POST https://api.example.com/users \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "John"}'

Flag	Effect
-X, --request	Method
-H, --header	Header
-d, --data, --data-raw, --data-binary	Body. Changes a GET to POST.
--json	Body plus Content-Type: application/json. Changes a GET to POST.
-u, --user	Authorization: Basic ...
-A, --user-agent	User-Agent header
-b, --cookie	Cookie header
-I, --head	HEAD
-G, --get	GET
-o, -x, -c, -m, -w, -e, --output, --proxy, --cookie-jar, --connect-timeout, --max-time, --write-out, --cacert, --cert, --key, --referer	Ignored, along with their argument
Other flags (-s, -L, -k, -v, --compressed, ...)	Ignored

The first argument that isn't a flag is used as the URL. If there isn't one, you get an error.

Copy as cURL

Press ⌘ Shift C to copy the current request to the clipboard as a cURL command:

curl -X GET 'https://api.example.com/users' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer abc123'

• Variables from the selected environment are substituted in. Undefined ones stay as {{NAME}}.
• Disabled (#) headers are left out.
• Arguments are single-quoted, so you can paste the command into a POSIX shell as is.

Sharing request files

Requests are plain .json files, so you can also share them by copying them, committing them to Git, or sending them to someone. See File Format.

Related

• Collections
• Environments
• File Format