Create a Collection
A collection in Bruno is a structured group of API requests, tests, and related resources that helps you organize and manage your API testing workflow.
How to Create a Collection
- Open Bruno and navigate to the home screen
- Click on the
+button and select Create Collection from the dropdown.
- Enter a name for your collection.
- (Optional):
- To store the collection at a custom location: click the settings icon (advanced options) and choose the desired folder on your system.
- Click on Options dropdown and select YAML to change the file format to YAML or BRU -> YAML recommended.
~/Documents/bruno (e.g. /Users/username/Documents/bruno). You can view or change the default location in Preferences → General tab. See Settings.
-
Choose or confirm the location on your filesystem for the collection.
-
Click Create
After you create a collection, use the + menu for related actions:
- Create a Collection - Creates a new collection in the current workspace.
- Open Collection - Opens one or more existing Bruno collections from a folder on disk.
- Import Collection - Imports a collection from other tools (Postman, GitHub Import, Insomnia, etc.).
How to open one or more collections
- Open Bruno and click the
+button in the left-top corner sidebar - Select Open Collection.
- Choose a folder on your filesystem.
- Bruno scans nested folders for Bruno collections (folders that contain
opencollection.ymlorbruno.json). - In the open collection modal, review the collections found.
- Select one or more collections, then click Open.
Bruno adds the selected collections to your workspace. You do not need to open each nested collection separately.
The flow matches how Bruno opens collections after a Git clone: scan the folder, list Bruno collections found inside, then select one or more to open.
Automatic Git Configuration
When you create a new collection or workspace, Bruno automatically generates a .gitignore file with recommended settings to ensure proper Git hygiene out of the box.
What's Included in .gitignore:
- Temporary files and caches
- Environment variable files with sensitive data
- Generated metadata
- System-specific files
.gitignore file helps prevent accidentally committing sensitive information (like API keys in environment variables) or unnecessary files to version control.
Custom Collection Names
You can use any characters in your collection names, including special characters like /, [, ], *, etc. Bruno automatically handles filesystem compatibility by replacing unsupported characters with - in the filenames while preserving your original collection name.
Add a request ↗ to your collection as a next step!