oa (short for "ooh ooh ah ah") is a simple command-line tool for monkey testing frontend applications.

Monkey testing is a technique in which random click, input and keyboard events are sent to an application to test its resilience. In other words, as if a monkey was using it. Monkey testing can also be helpful for adding an increased load to the application to debug performance and memory bottlenecks.

Unlike other load testing tools, oa uses Puppeteer under-the-hood to run your website in a real browser environment. While the browser is hidden by default, you can choose to show it via the --show flag.

Disclaimer: this tool is intended primarily for use on local websites. Attempting to run oa on a hosted website, especially one you don't own, is a good way to get your IP blocked.

Installation

Until official binaries can be released, the easiest way to install oa is from Deno itself:

deno install --allow-env --allow-write --allow-read --allow-run --allow-net https://deno.land/x/oa2

Usage

Using oa is fairly straightforward. You can test a website using the default options by just passing the URL to the command:

oa http://127.0.0.1:8080/login

Flags

oa supports a few flags to customize its behavior:

Name	Alias	Description	Default
--show	-s	Show the browser window while testing.	false
--num	-n	The number of monkeys/instances to run.	1
--duration	-d	The duration to run the test. Supports human-readable times such as '5m', '1 hour', etc.	10s
--header	-H	HTTP header to pass to the browser. Can be used multiple times.
--cookie	-c	Cookie string to pass to the browser. Can be used multiple times.
--skip-links	-L	Skip clicking on links.	false
--skip-inputs	-I	Skip filling in inputs.	false
--skip-clicking	-C	Skip random clicking on the page.	false
--skip-buttons	-B	Skip clicking on buttons.	false
--filter-links	-l	Only click on links that contain the provided string.
--config-file	-F	Path to a configuration file.

Configuration File

You can also pass a oa.config.json configuration file to oa to specify the above options as well:

{
  "$schema": "./oa.schema.json",
  "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8080/login",
  "show": false,
  "cookies": [
    {
      "name": "Key",
      "value": "Value",
      "expiresIn": 5000,
      "domain": "facebook.com"
    }
  ],
  "headers": {
    "Key": "Value"
  },
  "targets": {
    "links": {
      "enabled": true,
      "filter": "/read/1"
    },
    "buttons": {
      "enabled": true
    },
    "inputs": {
      "enabled": true
    },
    "clicking": {
      "enabled": true
    },
    "typing": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

In this case, you just need to run oa to start the monkeys. Unless the --config-file flag is used, oa will look in the current directory for a oa.config.json file.