Version 3 Preview Release 🚀🚀

[helloanoop]

Overview

Version 3 marks a major milestone in Bruno’s journey. Beyond the usual feature additions and bug fixes, v3 introduces foundational improvements across UX, workflows, Git integration, and extensibility.

This release sets the stage for where Bruno is headed in 2026 and beyond.

Download Bruno v3 Preview release from https://www.usebruno.com/downloads/v3-preview and give it a spin.
We’d love your feedback — please share your thoughts, bugs, and suggestions in this thread.

Big Features 🚀

1. UX Refresh (First major refresh in 4 years) ✨

Bruno is getting a modern, refreshed look just in time for Christmas.

What’s new

• Modern color palette with reduced use of grays
• More compact and information-dense UI
• Improved spacing and hierarchy
• Fully responsive layout

2. YAML Support (Beta) 📝

Bruno now supports YAML as a format for saving collection files.

• Choose YAML or .bru when creating a collection
• Built on our open-source OpenCollection specification

Specification is being open-sourced at OpenCollection - Open Specification for API Collections

Note:

• YAML support is released as beta
• YAML is planned to become the default format in February 2026
• Bruno will continue to support both .bru and YAML formats long-term

3. Workspaces 🗂️

Workspaces make it easier to organize and collaborate on collections.

Use cases

• Individuals: organize collections across multiple projects
• Teams: group collections by team, project, or domain

Key capabilities

• Organize collections into workspaces
• Share and version workspaces via Git

4. Git Superpowers 🧠

The Git experience in Bruno has received a full overhaul. Start a trial in the app to test it out.

New Git Capabilities

• Detailed commit history
• Commit graph visualization
• Click into commits to see exact changes
• Compare any two commits
• Request-level Git history
• Stash commits
• Built-in merge conflict resolution

5. Inbuilt Terminal 🖥️

Bruno now ships with a native, in-app terminal, giving you quick access to your workflow without leaving the app

Features Moving to the Free Tier 🆓

Several features previously available only in paid tiers are now free for everyone:

• File Mode – Toggle file mode to view raw request representations
• History – View full request history for a collection
• Create JS Files – Write reusable JavaScript modules and shared logic
• Import from Git Repo – Import collections directly from any Git repo
• Pull from Git Repo – Pull upstream changes from Git
• OpenAPI Import – Open and render an OpenAPI spec in Bruno
• OpenAPI Export – Export Bruno collections as OpenAPI specs

Breaking Changes to Watch Out For ⚠️

Scripting Runtime Change

• Bruno’s developer-mode scripting runtime moves from vm2 → NodeVM
• NodeVM resolves several long-standing limitations and issues with vm2
• Existing scripts are expected to continue to work as before

Bruno CLI Sandbox Defaults

• The Bruno CLI now defaults to Safe Mode for script execution
• To use developer mode, pass --sandbox=developer

Script Execution Scoping

Previously, scripts at all levels were merged into a single execution block. As a result, they shared the same scope and control flow. Bruno now executes each script level in its own isolated async scope.

• Variables declared in one script level are no longer shared with other levels
• return or guard clauses in a collection or folder script will not stop lower-level scripts from running
• Each script level now has independent execution scope

Dev Utils Removal

Bruno currently supports three developer utilities:

• Prettify JSON
• JSON → YAML
• JWT Decoder

These utilities have seen no meaningful updates in the past two years and have shown little to no community usage. JSON prettification is already available in the request body editor, making the standalone utility redundant, and we plan to do JWT decoding via automatic, in-app detection where tokens appear.

We see Dev Utils as a feature bloat. Removing it helps us stay focused on Bruno’s core goal: being a fast and focused API client that does its job really well.

Thank you

Bruno v3 is a big step forward for us, and a huge shoutout to our contributors and community. Thank you for being part of the journey and for supporting Bruno as it continues to grow.

We hope you love what we’ve built here and we’re excited to hear what you think as you explore v3.

• The Bruno Team ❤️

[PramodKumarYadav]

Thanks Bruno team for this major upgrade 🎊!

More specifically for making some of the useful paid features free and those important bug fixes 🙌🎉

[tpglitch]

Amazing!! What's the estimated time that Version 3 becomes stable?

[helloanoop]

In two weeks. 5 Jan 2026

[wsd11]

This is great!

A few thoughts/questions:

1. Is there an option to import from an OpenAPI spec to YAML, or a path to convert an existing .bru formatted collection to YAML OpenCollection?
2. Are there configuration instructions for the "Use System Browser" for Oauth2.0 somewhere? It looks like the callback behavior isn't all that clear on what needs to happen for Bruno to intercept the callback URL at this time.

[OfriHarlev]

I'd love to see some documentation around question 2. Turning it on out of the box didn't work for me, I was able to go through the flow but it didn't redirect to bruno so my Access Token never got saved by bruno

[helloanoop]

It looks like the callback behavior isn't all that clear on what needs to happen for Bruno to intercept the callback URL at this time.

@wsd11 @OfriHarlev We just deployed the repo - https://github.com/usebruno/oauth2-callback-website at https://oauth.usebruno.com/callback

OAuth flow using system browser should work. Could you try again ?
@sreelakshmi-bruno Could you please share the docs that we have created for this here?

Is there an option to import from an OpenAPI spec to YAML

Support for importing/exporting the collections with yml format is being worked upon. This will be available in v3.0.0-rc2 release

[OfriHarlev]

@helloanoop

The default that get's filled in in the V3 release is https://oauth2.usebruno.com/callback instead of https://oauth.usebruno.com/callback you reference above, is that a bug?

[sreelakshmi-bruno]

Hi, thanks for reporting. This is now corrected to https://oauth.usebruno.com/callback.

[sreelakshmi-bruno]

The docs for this is at https://docs.usebruno.com/auth/oauth2-2.0/system-browser

[glebovmaksim]

Awesome work — really loving the new look, and YAML support is huge 🔥

One thing I noticed in v3: I can’t seem to select custom response visualization anymore.
We’re using HTML visualization, but the visualization tab with its name is missing, and I also don’t see any related option in the formats dropdown.

Is this expected in the preview, or something that’s still coming?

[helloanoop]

Hey @glebovmaksim
We are fixing this. Should be available in the v3.0.0-rc2 that is expected to go out in a couple of days,

[kcliffe]

We used to use collection scripts to store common stuff. After installing v3, the pre-request script editor tells us the function doesn't exist (like it always did), however at runtime the function is not located. Is there a migration we are meant to do?

[helloanoop]

Hey @kcliffe

This is a breaking change. I’ll update the Breaking Changes section in the discussion and also reflect this on our website.

We decided to scope script execution strictly to what’s defined within the script itself, rather than allowing access to variables defined at the collection or folder level. The main reason is that this approach makes bugs harder to diagnose and fix, and in general, relying on variables defined elsewhere in the UX isn’t a best practice.

We used to use collection scripts to store common stuff.

I think there are better ways to solve this use case. One option is to extract common logic into reusable script files and import them as needed: https://docs.usebruno.com/testing/script/js-file
This functionality is now free in v3.

Another idea we could think of is introducing a shared namespace. For example:

Collection script

bru.shared.sayHello = function()  {
  console.log("Hello Bruno");
};

Request Script

bru.shared.sayHello()

Would love to hear your thoughts on this approach.

[GarlicPunk]

When using the js-file for script, the instructions suggest using the collection’s pre-request to set the global const.

We really need a way to at a collection level define globals use them across the collection

[martinsefcik]

@helloanoop I like this idea with shared namespace.

[FancyFunction]

Workspace feature is great! I just wish to select the folder name because I name the collection after the project and it is saved in a folder already named after the project. So it looks like this /rootPath/Project X/Project X/. Would be nice to have a display name so I can save the workspace in the following path /rootPath/Project X/Bruno Workspace.

[albertodiazsaez]

Hi!

v3 looks awesome, thank you guys for your work!

I noticed two things:

When using the new YAML format, saving a request response results in an array of [Object, object], saving in the old Bruno type saves it correctly.

Exporting the Collection to OpenAPI, it does not create a response as the examples saved, always marking it as:

     responses:
        '200':
          description: ''

Is in the roadmap that the responses are the examples saved? That would be really awesome!

Again, thank you for this beta release!

[helloanoop]

Exporting the Collection to OpenAPI, it does not create a response as the examples saved, always marking it as:

Thanks for reporting this. We are working on fixing this and this will be available in v3.0.0-rc2

Is in the roadmap that the responses are the examples saved?

Yes, In the stable release that is planned to go out on 5 Jan 2026, this will be available

[tlaloc911]

additionalContextRoots configuration doesn't work anymore (pre-request, test, post-response)

before, I could access scripts outside collection folder whitelisting them here

bruno.json

  "scripts": {
    "additionalContextRoots": [
      "../scripts",
      "../data"
    ],

now, I get an error message on both modes developer and safe

Test section

  const tests = require("../scripts/tests.js");

Message I get:

Test Script Error
Access to files outside of the collectionPath is not allowed: ../scripts/tests.js

[sebastien-dalge-maif]

Hello, I have same think here.
I don't want to see my scripts on UI so they are outside of colllection.

[helloanoop]

We are working on a fix. PR - #6491

[tlaloc911]

Are the functionalities moved from paid to free edition also going to be opensourced?

[helloanoop]

Yes, eventually. We did not do it for v3 as we have a huge manifest and didn’t want introduce bugs that may result from moving the code over

[tlaloc911]

thanks!!

[tlaloc911]

Hi!, its me again testing the preview, is there any way to open Chorme's dev tools? I am testing on windows and tried F12 without results

[tlaloc911]

CTRL+SHIFT+I

[ShiroTian]

Is it incompatible with Collection 2.0? I've set the old 2.0 directory as the default directory, but it's still empty.

[GarlicPunk]

I see when pressing CMD-E to open environments there is now a search option.

Can have a way to make an environment active? (I have nearly 200)

[ViktorNguyenn]

Hi Bruno Team,

First of all, thank you for the incredible work on the V3 RC-build! The new UI, categorized tabs, and the inclusion of JS files in the free plan are massive updates that fit perfectly with my current banking project automation. We really appreciate the effort you’re putting into this.

I am reaching out to report a regression I encountered after upgrading from v2.15.1 to V3.

🐞 Bug Report: "global is not defined" Error
Context: After updating to V3, some API requests that worked perfectly in v2.15.1 are now failing during the Pre-request script execution.
Issue: When running our Login API, we receive the error: ReferenceError: global is not defined.

Observations:

• Script Content: As seen in the attached screenshots, the global keyword is not used in the Pre-request script of the failing request.
• Cross-file Conflict: Upon investigation, I found the global keyword being used in a different file in a different location. Even though the filenames might be similar, they are isolated.
• Regression: This setup worked without issues in version 2.15.1. It seems like V3 might be leaking scope or misinterpreting global variables across different script contexts. and if i run in cli, they worked fine

✨ Feature Suggestion: "Warning" Status
In addition to the bug report, I have a suggestion for the runner: Currently, we follow a strict PASS/FAIL boolean concept. However, in complex testing scenarios, it would be extremely helpful to have a "Warning" status.

This would be useful for non-critical assertions where we want to alert the engineer to a potential issue without marking the entire CI/CD pipeline build as "Failed." This would add a great layer of granularity to the reporting.

Thank you again for your contribution to the open-source community. Let me know if you need more logs or specific environment details to help debug the "global" issue!

Best regards

[bijin-bruno]

Hi @ViktorNguyenn,
Could you please review this comment in the thread? It might help clarify the issue you’re facing.
Please let us know if you need further assistance.

[baek-sang]

Feature Request

1. Custom UI Font

• Currently, only the code editor font can be configured. Please allow the UI font to be set separately.

2. Improve - save request example

• Currently, saving full response bodies inside YAML causes file bloating and makes Git management difficult, especially with large or binary data.
  I suggest we refactor this to store only metadata(url, req, res header ...etc) in the YAML. We should extract the response body to a separate file in a subdirectory and just reference the file path in the YAML.

3. align

[zq99299]

Request for Simplified Chinese Support: Could You Share a Timeline?

Hi Bruno Team and Community,

First off, I want to say a huge thank you for building Bruno! It’s an amazing tool that’s made my API testing workflow so much smoother. The recent v3 Preview release with the UX refresh, YAML support, and inbuilt terminal is really impressive—these updates have already made a big difference in how I use the tool.

As someone who mainly uses Simplified Chinese in daily work, though, I’ve noticed that Bruno doesn’t currently support Simplified Chinese localization. For me and some colleagues who are more comfortable with Chinese interfaces, this adds a little friction when navigating the tool and understanding all its features fully.

I’m writing to politely ask: Do you have plans to add Simplified Chinese support in the future? If there are already plans in the works, could you share a rough timeline (like which upcoming versions or time frame we might expect it in)?

Thanks so much for your hard work on Bruno, and I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.

[tpglitch]

Bruno currently only supports English because there is no internationalization system. I've documented the issue here: #6729

[vkonovaltsev]

Missed cURL for import request

[helloanoop]

@vkonovaltsev You can choose http, and paste curl directly in the url. We plan to improve this experience further in the next versions.

[samgtgibson]

The Script Execution Scoping change is huge. To me this really improves the JS script file functionality, as it has been a pain to import modules without namespace clashes, particularly in post-response scripts in a sandwich flow execution.

I was just wondering what the timelines are? I would quite like to switch, but once I do my collections will quickly get incompatible with V2 and I won't be able to share them with colleagues who are still on v2.

[helloanoop]

Its live - https://www.usebruno.com/downloads 🎉 🎉

[samgtgibson]

Very exciting, I have it installed but don't have time to mess around with my collections too much at the moment.
The whole workspaces thing is very interesting, as is the OpenCollection html export.

[GarlicPunk]

@helloanoop does this 3.0.2 release have the shared namespace support?

[nicolasmafraintelipost]

Automatic updates should not apply to major releases. In version 3.0.2, I can no longer create new collections in the GUI, so I had to revert to the latest 2.x version.

[tpglitch]

Creating collections works fine for me in version 3.0.2. What specific issue are you encountering with creating collections in the GUI?

[nicolasmafraintelipost]

Created the collection file, but the import fails. Manual import results in the same error.

I reinstalled 3.0.2 via AppImage and it works fine. Maybe the issue only happens after automatic updates?
Unfortunately, I can’t reproduce the issue because with Snap I’m unable to install a previous version.

[trojanmartin]

We have an environment containing about 40 variables. It takes about 3-4 seconds to display such an environment. It's very laggy

[tpglitch]

Yikes! @helloanoop

[lucascosti]

Thanks for making request history a free feature! It was the main thing holding me back from recommending Bruno for people starting out. 👏👏

[MadMarty666]

Updated to 3.1.2, but since then the (pre-req) scripts are not read from the collection files. My collection files are on disk, and I can find the scripts in e.g. collection.bru. But the scripts are not available in the collection in the GUI.

Anyone else having this issue too?