How to disable cookies in Postman Application

Disabling cookies in Postman can be achieved through two primary methods. I will explain them in order:

Method 1: Using Postman's Cookie Management Feature

1. Open the Postman Application: First, open Postman and navigate to the specific API endpoint you're working on.
2. Access the Cookies Management Interface: In the top-right corner of Postman, there is a 'Cookies' button. Clicking this button opens the 'Manage Cookies' panel.
3. Delete Cookies:
   • Within this panel, you can view all cookies for the current domain.
   • Select an individual cookie and click the 'Delete' button to remove it.
   • To delete all cookies, click 'Delete All' to clear them instantly.

Although this method doesn't directly disable cookies, deleting them ensures that no cookies are sent with the current request.

Method 2: Disabling in Request Settings

1. Work on the Request Tab: Open or create a request in Postman.
2. Review Headers Settings: In the request settings, review the Headers section.
3. Manually Remove or Modify the Cookie Header:
   • You can remove the header line containing the Cookie, so the request won't send cookies.
   • Alternatively, modify the Cookie value to set it to empty or an invalid value.

Real-World Example

I used the above methods when testing an API requiring login authentication. The API sets a cookie after user login, and I needed to test the API's response without cookies. I used the first method, specifically the 'Delete All' function in the 'Manage Cookies' panel, to clear all cookies before testing. This confirmed that the API correctly returned a 401 error status code when unauthenticated.