ShellYard's HTTP client can route requests through SSH so you can reach internal-only APIs without manually building tunnels.
The problem
Postman, Insomnia, and Hoppscotch are excellent when the API is reachable from your machine — they were designed for the public-internet API economy. The moment the API lives behind a jump host, inside a customer VPN, on a lab subnet, or in a staging environment that isn't accessible from your laptop, the workflow falls apart.
Add the jump host, bastion, lab gateway, or any box that can already see the internal API as a saved SSH connection. ShellYard stores hosts in the active Space alongside the rest of the engagement's context — credentials in the vault, runbooks next door.
In the HTTP client, the Tunnel-via dropdown lists every active SSH session — pick one and outgoing requests flow through it. No manual ssh -L, no kubectl port-forward, no VPN switching. DNS, headers, body, and TLS all resolve from the remote network.
Send GET https://api.lab.internal/v1/health (or whichever private endpoint you couldn't reach from your laptop). The request leaves the remote host's NIC, hits the internal API directly, and the response comes back over the same SSH session.
Full response inspection: status code, response headers, parsed JSON or raw body, timing breakdown, cookies. Re-send with a tweaked param. Save the request to a collection. Promote it to an environment variable. Everything you'd expect from a modern HTTP client, scoped to the route that actually reaches the API.
Attach the response to Magellan. It can explain a confusing 503 cascade, summarize a long JSON payload, draft a runbook entry, or generate a customer-facing summary. BYO Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini / Ollama key. Operators always run the actual command.
Drop the request, the response, and Magellan's explanation into a note, runbook, or incident report inside the active Space. The next engineer who hits the same internal-API problem finds your fix next to the SSH connection it was diagnosed through, not in someone's chat history.
Respect for Postman
Postman is a strong tool for public-API work, contract testing, and team-shared collections of mature endpoints. ShellYard is designed for infrastructure-aware API workflows — where the request, the host, the credentials, and the documentation belong in the same workspace. Postman v2.1 imports work, so you don't have to pick one forever.
Free covers SSH, the HTTP / GraphQL / Realtime client, and Magellan with your provider key. Pro adds persistent HTTP collections, environments, the collection runner, and cloud sync.