gotling

Simple golang-based load test application using YAML documents as specification.

For a more full-blown explanation of what Gotling is about, see my blog post here: http://callistaenterprise.se/blogg/teknik/2015/11/22/gotling/

Recent updates

• UPDATE 2020-05-11: The sleep actions now also accepts golang time.Duration strings, i.e. 500ms 2s or 3m etc. Any pure numbers specified are still treated as whole seconds.
• UPDATE 2020-04-22: Leon Stigter added support for adding arbitrary HTTP headers
• UPDATE 2020-04-08: Leon Stigter fixed the JSONPath problem
• UPDATE 2019-04-04: I've updated gotling to use Go modules and changed the project structure to follow https://github.com/golang-standards/project-layout better**

Disclaimer

Please note that this was my very first golang program back in 2015 and it's still (2020) probably full of anti-patterns and other nasty stuff. I'm not actively developing Gotling but I'll happily accept sensible PRs!

What it does

• Provides high-throughput load testing of HTTP services
  • Supports GET, POST, PUT and DELETE
  • Live metrics using HTML5 canvas from canvasjs
  • Request URLs and bodies can contain ${paramName} parameters
  • ${paramName} values can be extracted from HTTP response bodies and bound to a User context
  • Capturing Set-Cookie response headers
  • POST data can be inlined or read from template files
• TCP/UDP sockets
  • Can send line-terminated text strings
  • Possible to use ${varname} variables in payload
  • Does not currently support body parsing or variable extraction from data incoming on the TCP/UDP socket.

Building

Requires Go 1.11 or later to be installed on your computer.

NEW: Build using Go Modules

As per 2019-04-03 gotling shall be built using Go modules and there's a Makefile to help out.

1. Clone the source from github

git clone https://github.com/eriklupander/gotling.git

2. Build using Make

cd gotling
make build

3. Building for other OS's

make release

Check the dist/ folder for binaries for OS X, Linux and Window (AMD64)

Note! You still need the samples, data and log folders in the same root directory as your gotling binary when running.

4. Running

If you built gotling using make build, you'll find your binary in the bin/ folder. Try running the sample "xmldemo":

> ./bin/gotling samples/xmldemo.yml

Usage

Define your test setup in a .yml file

---
iterations: 10          # Number of iterations per user
users: 10               # Number of users
rampup: 20              # seconds
actions:                # List of actions. Currently supports http, tcp, udp, sleep
  - http:
      method: GET                                  # GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
      url: http://localhost:8183/courses           # URL. Can include ${paramName} parameters
      accept: json                                 # Only 'json' is currently supported
      response:                                    # Defines response handling
        jsonpath: $[*].id+                         # JsonPath expression to capture data from JSON response
        variable: courseId                         # Parameter name for captured value
        index: first                               # If > 1 results found - which result to store in 'variable': 
                                                   # first, random, last
  - sleep:
      duration: 3                                  # Sleep duration in seconds. Will block current user
  - http:
      method: GET
      url: http://localhost:8183/courses/${courseId}
      accept: json
      response:
        jsonpath: $.author+
        variable: author
        index: first
  - sleep:
        duration: 300ms                             # Note sleep using time.Duration format.
  - tcp:
        address: 127.0.0.1:8081                     # TCP socket connection
        payload: |TYPE|1|${UID}|${email}            # Sample data using parameter substitution

HTTP headers

Gotling supports adding HTTP headers in the YAML specification:

- http:
    title: Some title
    method: POST
    headers:
        foo: bar
        hello: world
    url: http://localhost:9183/mypath
    body: '{"id":100,"name":"Some name","author":"${author}-${someId}","created":"2015-10-23T21:33:38.254+02:00","baseLatitude":45.634353,"baseLongitude":11.3424324}'
    accept: application/json

To give this a try, create a RequestBin URL will collect requests made to it and let you inspect them in a human-friendly way and paste that URL in the demoheaders.yml on line 9.

HTTP POST bodies

Gotling supports POST/PUT bodies either directly inlined in the YAML specification, or read from a template file:

Inlined

- http:
    title: Some title
    method: POST
    url: http://localhost:9183/mypath
    body: '{"id":100,"name":"Some name","author":"${author}-${someId}","created":"2015-10-23T21:33:38.254+02:00","baseLatitude":45.634353,"baseLongitude":11.3424324}'
    accept: application/json

Note that we use body in the inlined example

From template

- http:
    title: Submit query
    method: POST
    url: http://localhost:8080/myxmlservice
    template: myproject/MyFancySOAPRequest.xml
    accept: application/xml

In this example, we use template instead of body. The myproject/ folder should always be placed in the /templates directory in the root of the project. Note that ${varName} variable substitution from feeders (see below) or values captured from previous responses in the action sequence can be used in template files.

Feeders and user context

Gotling currently support CSV feeds of data. First line needs to be comma-separated headers with the following lines containing data, e.g:

id,name,size
1,Bear,Large
2,Cat,Small
3,Deer,Medium

These values can be accessed through ${varname} matching the column header.

The UID

Each "user" gets a unique "UID" assigned to it, typically an integer from 10000 + random(no of users). Perhaps I can tweak this to either use UUID's or configurable intervals. Anyway, the UID can be used using ${UID} and can be useful for grouping data etc.

Capturing cookies

It's quite common that you need to load-test a secured API. Gotling provides a mechanism that allows you to capture Set-Cookie response headers which then will be automatically applied to subsequent HTTP actions for the current user.

Here is an example where a form-based login POST is used for logging in and storing the returned JSESSIONID cookie

- http:
  title: Login
  method: POST
  url: https://some.host.name/login
  body: 'put your urlencoded form data here'
  accept: '*/*'
  contentType: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
  storeCookie: JSESSIONID

Variable capture from HTTP response bodies

It's possible to use jsonpath OR xmlpath to capture variables from HTTP responses (json or xml) and use in subsequent invocations during the ongoing sequence of actions. See ${courseId} in the sample above.

A similar sample for xmlpath:

- http:
          method: GET
          url: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/cd_catalog.xml
          accept: text/xml
          response:
            xmlpath: //title
            variable: myTitleVar
            index: random
- http:
          method: GET
          url: http://some.other.service.maybe/authors/${myTitleVar}
          accept: json

Please note that a response definition only may contain either a jsonpath OR an xmlpath. You can't have both.

For more on xmlpath, see xmlpath

Important note: xmlpath for Go does not support xml namespaces!

HTTPS support

Gotling currently supports HTTPS, including hosts using self-signed certificates.

In the future, we'll probably add an option to allow/disallow unsecure https.

Realtime dashboard

Access at http://localhost:8182

Click "connect" to connect to the currently executing test.

HTML reports

Not functional right now :(

Uses the following libraries

• github.com/davecheney/profile
• gopkg.in/yaml.v2
• gopkg.in/xmlpath.v2
• gorilla/websocket
• highcharts

License

Licensed under the MIT license.

See LICENSE