Show HN: A Swiss army knife for testing HTTP from the terminal

110 points by hassy 4 years ago | 42 comments

Hiya HN!

Just released Artillery Probe - a Swiss army knife for testing HTTP from the CLI. Think mini-curl with better UX for common use-cases, plus a couple of extra features.

Would love for you to try it and give some feedback!

https://www.artillery.io/blog/swiss-army-knife-for-http-testing

and:

  npm install artillery@latest

What does it do?

- First of all, it's a HTTP client! It does all the usual stuff you'd expect from a HTTP client... HTTP methods, request bodies, custom headers, forms, Basic Auth etc.

- Got some JSON or XML back? It'll pretty-print it, and syntax highlight it for you.

- It'll show you request waterfalls like this one: (inspired by httpstat)

   DNS Lookup | TCP Connection | SSL Handshake | Time to First Byte | Content Transfer
    56ms      |  14ms          |     19ms      |     181ms          |   88ms          |
              |                |               |                    |                 |
              56ms             |               |                    |                 |
                            70ms               |                    |                 |
                                             89ms                   |                 |
                                                                  270ms               |
                                                                                 total:358ms

- JSON responses can be queried and sliced and diced with JMESPath (same syntax as AWS CLI) - no need to reach for jq. XML & HTML may be queried with a jQuery-like syntax too.

- You can set expectations on the response, e.g. have the CLI check that the response is a 200, or that a certain header is set, and exit with non-zero code if not. Super handy for quick acceptance testing.

We've got lots of ideas for improvements, but would love to hear what you think!

numlock86 4 years ago |

Nice idea. NodeJS and thousands of NPM dependencies are a big no-go with a red flag on top, though. One of the things something like Go probably would have been a better choice for. See "bombardier" for example.

hassy 4 years ago | |

Bombardier is cool, but serves a very different use case.

I mentioned elsewhere in the comments that we have a Docker image, and are working on other methods of installing the CLI to alleviate some of these dependency-related concerns.

Getting side tracked here, but there seems to be a common sentiment when it comes to Node.js that it's uniquely insecure. Node.js has indeed had some unfortunate press when it comes to supply-chain security, but every other runtime is susceptible to those attacks (PiPy, Gems, Maven, Rust Crates). Ultimately of course, if you choose to avoid using any software built on top of those stacks, that's your choice.

Artillery specifically is no different to any other Node.js-based project in how large the dependency tree is. VSCode for instance is used by millions of developers has 1.6k dependencies [1].

1. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/network/dependencies

numlock86 4 years ago | | |

> Bombardier is cool, but serves a very different use case.

Yes, of course. I was just taking an arbitrary example from my common HTTP toolbox.

> VSCode for instance is used by millions of developers has 1.6k dependencies [1].

VSCode is maintained by Microsoft plus a huge community and they are transparent about their process in regards of auditing/freezing dependencies.

hassy 4 years ago |

clickable url: https://www.artillery.io/blog/swiss-army-knife-for-http-test...

dj_mc_merlin 4 years ago |

Nice project. How are the request waterfalls done?

hassy 4 years ago | |

thank you! we just grab the timings info for the request from the underlying HTTP library, and sprinkle some ASCII art on top. That part was inspired by httpstat [1]

We want to extend those with support for Server-Timing next, and also Core Web Vitals [3] (via Playwright) for web pages.

1. https://github.com/reorx/httpstat

2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Se...

3. https://web.dev/vitals/

arinlen 4 years ago |

Other than pretty printing the output, what does this offer that curl doesn't already do?

hassy 4 years ago | |

A few things :)

Syntax highlighting

Request performance waterfalls

Built-in JMESPath queries for JSON (same syntax as in AWS CLI). XML and HTML can be queried too.

Ability to set checks on the response. This one is super handy for quick acceptance tests.

ushakov 4 years ago |

does this require Node.JS?

edit: it looks like you need to install 1276 npm dependencies to use this tool

https://github.com/artilleryio/artillery/network/dependencie...

i'll pass, the risk is unacceptable for value it offers, especially in corporate environments

jsd1982 4 years ago |

> npm install

Sorry, lost me at this part. Have a better installation story like a single executable.

Beyond that, what does this do that curl, wget, et al do not? How is your interface better than those? Is it robust in the face of errors? What http protocol versions does it support?

guacom 4 years ago | |

> Have a better installation story like a single executable.

Holy guacamole this is an entitled sentiment. It’s an open source project and it’s free.

jsd1982 4 years ago | | |

Feedback was explicitly requested. That was my feedback on installation. It's not entitled and has nothing to do with the project being free or open source. Where'd that come from?

hassy 4 years ago | |

if you’re on a Mac, Artillery has a Homebrew formula too. We have an official Docker image too. Other ways of installing are on the roadmap too (self contained tarballs and binaries).

As to what it does better than curl/wget. Probe is geared towards interactive use with HTTP APIs. So you get syntax highlighting and pretty printing for JSON, built-in querying, request waterfall visualizations, and ability to set expectations on every response.

HTTP/2 is supported.

ovebepari 4 years ago |

It would take me something extraordinary to move away from curl

blacksmith_tb 4 years ago | |

Sure, if you've got muscle memory for all the flags (plus it lets you reason about all the other programs that pipe stuff to curl). I personally find myself using httpie [1] at least as much.

1: https://httpie.io/

ratorx 4 years ago | | |

I think curlie is the middle ground and the best (IMO) in the space. A nicer CLI for interactive use and can use and output curl flags for scripting.

chrismarlow9 4 years ago | |

The big win with curl is the growing adoption of "copy as curl" in browser dev tools as well as "example of API call in curl" for third party API documentation.

I don't think I could move to anything else for that reason alone.

hassy 4 years ago | |

curl is amazing! I love curl. This is not meant to replace it completely. Probe just makes those most common use-cases friendlier, like looking at headers, or inspecting JSON retuned by an API with syntax highlighting, or querying without needing to reach for jq etc.

rgoulter 4 years ago | |

In Emacs, I found the restclient plugin quite useful. https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

I imagine other editors have similar plugins.

throwawayboise 4 years ago | | |

Awesome! This comment made reading this thread worthwhile.