Sessions need a Windows laptop or desktop.
If you’re on your phone now, that’s fine. Enrol now and we’ll email you a link so you can pick up when you’re at a computer.
Bruno · Foundations
Test a shop's order API with Bruno, from your first request to a whole collection that passes.
What you’ll end up with
A Bruno collection, Kestrel Shop API, for an invented bike-parts shop: five requests to a public echo service, two environments, a secret key, assertions and test scripts, an order number carried from one response to the next request, and a run of the whole collection with every request passing, saved as plain files on your own computer. Then a second collection for an invented tea shop, from briefs.
10
hours in all — about 6½ guided, 3½ on your own
6
sessions. Each designed to be completed in one sitting
Free
No payment and no card required.
Finishing gives you a completion record showing the work you built, and all three levels earn the Alongrail Certificate in Bruno. See what you’ll build →
You don’t need prior experience with Bruno. There’s no payment and no card required.
From a test plan to a collection that passes
01105 min
Install Bruno and send your first request
Bruno installed from its own page with no account, a collection named Kestrel Shop API saved as YAML in a folder on your computer, and the plan's first request — check stock, with two query parameters — sent to the echo service, its answer read, and the request saved.
0285 min
Send an order, and read what was sent
The request Place order made as a POST with the plan's order as its JSON body, typed on one line and laid out with Prettify, sent, and the echo read for the method, the body type Bruno declared and the three fields as the service received them; then saved.
03115 min
Two environments and a secret
Two environments, Practice and Rehearsal, each with the variables host and stage and the secret `apiKey`, the second made as a copy of the first and given its own stage and its own key; Check stock and Place order rewritten to use the variables, Check stock sending the key in the header X-Api-Key; Check stock sent from each environment and the echo read for the stage and the key; and Practice's file read in Notepad, holding the key's name and not its value.
04100 min
A key, a refusal, and checks that can fail
Key accepted sending the secret as a Bearer token, answered 200 OK with authenticated true, and checked by two assertions; No key refused sending no key at all, answered 401 Unauthorized, with an assertion first written for 200 and seen to fail, then corrected to 401 and seen to pass; and an assertion on Check stock's status.
05110 min
Test scripts, and one answer feeding the next request
Place order carrying three test lines that pass by name; the order reference taken from Place order's answer into a runtime variable and seen in the Variables view; and Order status built with that variable in its URL, sent, and checked with an assertion that the address ends with the order's own path.
0685 min
Run the whole collection, and see it as files
The whole collection run in the Collection Runner from Practice and again from Rehearsal, five requests and every check passing both times; Place order read in File Mode as the YAML file Bruno writes; and the collection's folder seen in File Explorer, one file per request and the environments folder.
What you need before you start
A Windows laptop or desktop
Sessions need a Windows laptop or desktop. If you’re on your phone now, that’s fine. Enrol now and we’ll email you a link so you can pick up when you’re at a computer. Windows 10 or Windows 11, on an x64 or an Arm64 processor.
Chrome or Edge
Alongrail runs in the browser, beside Bruno.
The course files
Everything you work with is in the download.
What’s free
The whole course: every session, both parts, the files, and your record. Alongrail charges nothing for it. No payment, and no card at any point.
The software
None. Bruno's Open Source edition is free with no account, and the echo service is free and public. Nothing in this course is bought, and no trial is started.
The data you’ll work with
Every file is invented — the companies, the people and everything in them are made up for the course.
Before you start
The course covers Bruno, on your own computer.
- A Windows 10 or Windows 11 computer on which you may install an application for yourself
- An internet connection that can reach httpbingo.org, a free public test service. It is not Bruno's and not Alongrail's: it answers every request with exactly what it was sent, and its answers include your own internet address. Send it nothing but the invented values in this course
- No account anywhere. Bruno's free edition has no sign-in, and this course uses nothing paid in it: no trial, no report download, no data file, no AI Assistant
- The test plan kestrel-test-plan.pdf from the course page, saved where you can open it; and the on-your-own plan marlowe-test-plan.pdf
- For a fresh start on any session after the first, that session's start file from the course page — kestrel-s2-start.zip to kestrel-s6-start.zip, and marlowe-s2-start.zip to marlowe-s6-start.zip — each holding the collection's folder as the sessions before leave it. The key is never in them; a fresh start types it again from the plan
- Share your whole screen with Alongrail rather than one window: the course reads Bruno, and in three of its sessions File Explorer or Notepad too
- Each session has a guided run on Kestrel and an on-your-own run on Marlowe. Do the on-your-own run after its guided run — straight after, or once all six guided sessions are done
- A fresh start on the on-your-own run works the way the guided one does: remove the listed collection, unzip that session's marlowe start file, open its folder with Open collection, and from session four on type each environment's key from the Marlowe plan into its Secrets again and choose the first environment in the environment selector; if Bruno has been closed and the selector reads No Environment, choose it again
- Who sees what: your collection stays on your computer as files; every request you send goes to httpbingo.org, which sees what you send and answers with your own internet address twice — as origin, and again in an X-Forwarded-For header that its hosting platform adds, not Bruno — both visible to anyone you share your screen with while you read that answer; the keys are practice values that open nothing
- Alongrail is not affiliated with Bruno or with httpbingo.org. The software is named plainly, without its logo
- No command line, no Git, no automatic runs: they belong to the level after this one, and the command line needs Node.js installed first.
- One collection with no folders, and scripts written only as test lines and one Post Response variable; collection-level scripts, the response query and schema checks are the next level's.
- The requests go to an echo service, not a real shop: it proves the requests and the checks, and the real system would only need the host changed.
- The course was written and checked on Linux. Nothing in it has been run on Windows: what it says about the Windows installer, the default folder, the folder picker, Reveal in File Explorer, File Explorer and Notepad comes from Bruno's own source code at the version this course was written against, and from Microsoft's own pages, rather than from anyone having done it on Windows.
Alongrail teaches the software and gives you a record of what you built, with a link to the work itself. What happens with it afterwards is yours. We don’t place people and we take no part in anyone’s recruitment process.
Enrol free and start now.
Sign in, confirm the one thing the course needs, and session 1 opens. No payment, and no card at any point.
If something goes wrong on the way, press “Something’s wrong” in the panel, or write to hello@alongrail.com — we reply within one working day.
Frequently asked questions
What you build
Start with a shop developer's test plan and a computer with no API client on it, and finish with a Bruno collection that tests the plan: requests with parameters, a JSON body and headers, two environments with the key kept out of the files, a request that must be refused, checks that fail when they should and pass when they should, one answer carried into the next request, and the whole collection run at once with every request passing.
A Bruno collection, Kestrel Shop API, for an invented bike-parts shop: five requests to a public echo service, two environments, a secret key, assertions and test scripts, an order number carried from one response to the next request, and a run of the whole collection with every request passing, saved as plain files on your own computer. Then a second collection for an invented tea shop, from briefs.
How a session works
- Open Bruno
- Share your screen
- One instruction
- You do it
- It confirms it
- Next
You open Bruno and share your screen. Alongrail reads what’s there and gives you one instruction. You do it. It confirms the step landed, then gives you the next one. If something doesn’t match what you see, one button gets you back on track.
Guided
In the Fields list, tick Region. The chart fills in.
One field on the axis, one measure as the value.
then
On your owna different company’s data
Same job, a different company's files. Alongrail stays quiet until you ask.
Guided, then on your own.
The second part of every session uses a different company’s data, with the same kind of mess in different places. Alongrail stays quiet until you ask. It’s the work your record points to.
About 10 hours in all·about 6½ guided·about 3½ on your own
What you earn — the record, the certificate and a sample
Completion record
- Name
- Your name
- Course
- Bruno Foundations — test a shop's order API with Bruno, from your first request to a whole collection that passes
- Completed
- The date you finish
- Project
- The API test collection you built on your own →
- Skills demonstrated
- Installing an API client and creating a collection saved as plain files · Sending GET and POST requests with query parameters, headers and a JSON body, and reading the response · Using environments and variables to send the same requests to different targets · Keeping a secret out of a collection's files · Sending a key as Bearer authorisation, and testing that a request with no key is refused · Writing assertions and JavaScript test scripts, and reading their results · Writing a check that fails for the right reason before it passes · Passing a value from one response into the next request · Running a whole collection in the Collection Runner · Reading a collection as its files on disk
What was built
A Bruno collection, Kestrel Shop API, for an invented bike-parts shop: five requests to a public echo service, two environments, a secret key, assertions and test scripts, an order number carried from one response to the next request, and a run of the whole collection with every request passing, saved as plain files on your own computer. Then a second collection for an invented tea shop, from briefs.
The 6 sessions, and when each was completed on their own
Each session was completed twice: once with step-by-step guidance on one company’s data, then on a second company’s data from a brief, with guidance only when asked. Every check passed on both. Alongrail records the sessions, the checks and the dates; the dashboard itself is the learner’s own, hosted where they chose.
A completion record for Bruno Foundations, now. It names the course, the date you finished, the skills you demonstrated, and links the API test collection you built on your own. It’s private until you publish it, and you can unpublish it at any time.
The record is a description of work you did, not a claim about you. Anyone who opens it can see the work for themselves.
The Alongrail Certificate in Bruno when all three levels are complete. Foundations is the first of three. Practitioner and Professional are in development, with no dates. See the track →
Your screen stays yours
It looks when you ask. Never otherwise. Images of your screen are not stored. What Alongrail sees →
Nothing you build is public until you publish it. Your record is private until you say so, and you can unpublish it at any time.
What’s Bruno?
Bruno is the software this course is built in. It runs on your own computer.
You won’t learn it by watching hours of tutorials. You’ll learn it by building something real with it.
Who you’re building it for
Kestrel Cycle Parts sells bike parts online, and its order system is being rebuilt. The new system is not ready yet, but its developer has already written down what it must do: check stock, take an order, accept a key, turn away a request with no key, and report an order's status.
Those five promises are the test plan, and the trouble with them starts after the first week. Every time the system changes, somebody has to send all five requests again and read all five answers to find out whether something that worked yesterday has quietly stopped working. Done by hand that is slow enough to be done at first and then not, and the promise that breaks is the one nobody checked.
Until the real system exists, every request goes to a public test service that answers with exactly what it was sent, so the requests and the checks can be built and proved now and pointed at the real system later.
The developer wants the tests kept as files alongside the code, with the key out of them, and wants all five run at once, in one go, by anyone on the team and not only by whoever wrote them.
This course is that job, done in Bruno's free edition, with nothing paid for and no account anywhere.
Your job is to build the API test collection that answers it.
Do I need to know Bruno already?
No. The course assumes you’ve never opened it.
What if I get stuck?
Press the button in the panel and say what you see. Alongrail works out where you actually are and picks the instruction back up.
Why 10 hours, when other courses are 40?
Because the time is spent doing the work rather than watching it. About 6½ hours is guided; the rest is you building the same thing again on your own.
What does Alongrail see on my screen?
Only the window you choose to share, and only when you ask it to look. Images of your screen are not stored by Alongrail. What Alongrail sees →
Can I use a Mac?
Not yet. Bruno is Windows-only, so this course is too.
What if I miss a week?
Nothing closes. The dates are there to help you keep moving, not to catch you out.
What’s the “on your own” part?
The second half of every session: the same work on a different company’s data, with Alongrail quiet unless you ask. Both parts are needed for your completion record.
Is it really free?
Yes. No payment, and no card at any point.
Who can see what I build?
Nobody, until you say so. Your record is private until you publish it, and you can unpublish it at any time. What you build stays in your own files or account; where a step publishes something to the software’s own site, the step says so and says who can see it.
Where this course sits
Bruno Foundations is Foundations in Bruno. The track has three levels; each one you complete earns its own record, and all of them together earn the Alongrail Certificate in Bruno. All the courses →