Testing websites, web applications, or generally everything reachable with the HTTP protocol, can be a challenging exercise. Thanks to tools like curl and jq, DevOps workflows have become more productive and even simple monitoring tasks can be automated with CI/CD pipeline schedules. Sometimes, use cases require specialized tooling with custom HTTP headers, parsing expected responses, and building end-to-end test pipelines. Stressful incidents also need good and fast tools that help analyze the root cause and quickly mitigate and fix problems.
Hurl is an open-source project developed and maintained by Orange, and uses libcurl from curl to provide HTTP test capabilities. It aims to tackle complex HTTP test challenges by providing a simple plain text configuration to describe HTTP requests. It can chain requests, capture values, and evaluate queries on headers and body responses. So far, so good: Hurl does not only support fetching data, it can be used to test HTTP sessions and XML (SOAP) and JSON (REST) APIs.
Getting Started
Hurl comes in various package formats to install. On macOS, a Homebrew package is available.
$ brew install hurl
First steps with Hurl
Hurl proposes to start with the configuration file format first, which is a great way to learn the syntax step by step. The following example creates a new gitlab-contribute.hurl configuration file that will do two things: execute a GET HTTP request on https://about.gitlab.com/community/contribute/ and check whether its HTTP response contains the HTTP protocol 2 and status code 200 (OK).
$ vim gitlab-contribute.hurl
GET https://about.gitlab.com/community/contribute/
HTTP/2 200
$ hurl --test gitlab-contribute.hurl
gitlab-contribute.hurl: Running [1/1]
gitlab-contribute.hurl: Success (1 request(s) in 413 ms)
