What you’ll learn

How to add assertions and expectations to HTTP scenarios with artillery-plugin-expect plugin

How to use the plugin to run functional tests for your API with Artillery

Overview

Easy functional testing for your HTTP API with Artillery

Add expectations and assertions to your HTTP scenarios
Use the same artillery command to run functional / acceptance tests on your APIs
See details of any failed assertions (request headers & body, response etc)
Use your Artillery scenarios for both functional testing and load testing
Run post-deployment smoke tests from CI/CD pipelines

Usage

Install the plugin

npm install -g artillery-plugin-expect

Enable the plugin

To enable the plugin, add it to the config section of a test script.

config:
  target: "http://lab.artillery.io"
  plugins:
    expect: {}

Add expectations to HTTP requests

scenarios:
  - name: Get a movie
    flow:
      - get:
          url: "/movies/5"
          capture:
            - json: "$.title"
              as: title
          expect:
            - statusCode: 200
            - contentType: json
            - hasProperty: title
            - equals:
              - "From Dusk Till Dawn"
              - "{{ title }}"

Try it live!

Run the test

Run your script that uses expectations with:

artillery run --quiet my-script.yaml

(The --quiet option is to stop Artillery from printing its default reports to the console.)

Run load + functional tests

This plugin allows for the same scenario to be re-used for either load testing or functional testing of an API, with the help of config.environments definition in your test script.

(The only real difference between the two, of course, is how many virtual users you run – only one for functional tests, and lots of virtual users for a load test.)

config:
  target: "https://my.api.internal"
  environments:
    #
    # This is our load testing profile, where we create a lot of virtual users.
    # Note that we don't load the plugin here, so that we don't see the output
    # from the plugin.
    #
    load:
      phases:
        - duration: 600
          arrivalRate: 10
    #
    # This is our functional testing profile, with a single virtual user, and
    # the plugin enabled.
    #
    functional:
      phases:
        - duration: 1
          arrivalCount: 1
      plugins:
        expect: {}
scenarios:
  # Your scenario definitions go here.

You could run the script above in load testing mode with:

artillery run --environment load script.yaml

and in functional testing mode with:

artillery run --environment functional script.yaml

Expectations

`statusCode`

Check that the status code of the response.

expect:
  - statusCode: 201

The value may also be a list to indicate that any of the codes in the list is OK:

expect:
  - statusCode:
    - 200
    - 301

`contentType`

Check the value of Content-Type header.

`hasProperty` and `notHasProperty`

When the response is JSON, check that the response object has a property (or does not in case of notHasProperty). Same behavior as lodash#has.

expect:
  - hasProperty: 'data[0].id'

`equals`

Check that two or more values are the same. NOTE only primitive values (e.g. booleans, strings and numbers) are currently supported.

- get:
    url: "/pets/f037ed9a"
    capture:
      - json: "$.species"
        as: species
    expect:
      - equals:
          - "{{ species }}"
          - "dog"

`hasHeader`

Check that the response contains a header.

- get:
    url: "/pets/f037ed9a"
    expect:
      - hasHeader: "object-version"

`headerEquals`

Check that the response contains a header and its value matches some string.

- get:
    url: "/pets/f037ed9a"
    expect:
      - headerEquals:
        - "object-version"
        - "v3"

`matchesRegexp`

Check that response body matches a regular expression. The regular expression provided must be a string which is a valid argument to the RegExp constructor.

- get:
    url: "/pets/f037ed9a"
    expect:
      - matchesRegexp: .+ # body is not empty

Debugging

If you’re having issues with the plugin, you can print out helpful debugging messages using the DEBUG environment variable.

Print expectations and values

Set DEBUG=plugin:expect when running your tests to view when using an expectation and any values to check.

DEBUG=plugin:expect artillery run my-script.yaml

More Information

The source code for artillery-plugin-expect is available on Github at https://github.com/artilleryio/artillery-plugin-expect. It’s an officially supported plugin and we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for improvement.

What you’ll learn