Bell

A REST scripting language

April 2026

I still dislike Postman. Heavy GUI tools for API testing always feel like they’re fighting against the developer’s workflow. You have to click through menus, manage collections in a proprietary format, and it’s a nightmare to version control.

And now, with the ubiquity of AI chat bots, developers want their coding agents to be able to handle all aspects of their projects. That means more documentation, configs, and resources living in your codebase.

I wanted something that:

was simple
readable
could live and run in VSCode
was free
wasn’t plagued by cloud features and strange organization patterns

To achieve these goals, I decided to make a programming language specialized for making HTTP requests. Simple script files can live in your codebase, alongside your project. For here, you and your coding assistant can easily read and edit it in your editor, run it from your terminal or a VSCode extension, and collaborate on it with git.

Cleaner than Postman. Clearer than cUrl.

The Idea

I first started ideating on Bell back in 2024. The idea was to create a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that was as readable as a cURL command but as powerful as a full testing suite.

Now, with AI to help me with the more complex parts of the parser and runtime, I’ve brought that proof-of-concept to life.

How it Works

Bell scripts are simple .bel files. You define your endpoint, headers, and body using a clean, declarative syntax.

url "https://api.example.com/v1/login"

body {
  "username": "admin",
  "password": "{env.ADMIN_PASSWORD}"
}

POST

That’s it!

Building the Monorepo

In this MVP phase, it was important to build a little bit of every aspect of what this language could be. That meant in a monorepo we created:

a core package for bell-lang
a vscode package for the VSCode extension
a docs app that serves the website explaining bell
a test-app app for local testing

I also included:

scripts to make publishing on npm and vscode at the same time easy
a skill for AI to write bell files

Plans

It was fun, but I don’t plan on pursuing this further.

There are plenty of other projects out there that do this same thing, like:

Bruno
Hurl
.http files

My new favorite of which is Bruno which also positions itself as a git-first api client. It works less like a language and more like config files, but the GUI makes exploratory testing easy.

Hurl is probably the most similar to what Bell does, in that Hurl files execute sequentially and store variables like a programming language.

I feel that with some support from other devs, Bell could become a viable option for testing APIs. It would come down to a matter of preference for how the language is shaped.