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Hurl: Run and test HTTP requests with plain text

461 points by flykespice 1y ago

mikmoila 1y ago
Very interesting tool; I've done something quite similar by implementing a CLI-mode interpreter to VS Code Rest-client (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...) files, with a support of executing a test-code (Javascript) against the result of http operations. The idea was to have a tool which could run .http files in batch mode, and also to execute the selected set of http operations concurrently.
sanix-darker 1y ago
Is it me or, they took inspiration from : https://github.com/Sanix-Darker/dycow https://github.com/Sanix-Darker/dycow
laerus 1y ago
What's missing from Hurl is snapshot testing. After using `insta` for testing APIs, I cannot go back.
- porker 1y ago
  Is this https://insta.rs/ https://insta.rs/? What are the benefits you've found with snapshot testing?
  - laerus 1y ago
    Greatly reduced boilerplate. Diffing snapshots and providing previews to accept or reject changes is also more robust and user friendly.
- whilenot-dev 1y ago
  What's your value proposition for snapshots and why can't that already be fulfilled with full body checks? https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl?tab=readme-ov-file#checking-full-body https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl?tab=readme-ov-file...
  - laerus 1y ago
    Snapshots diff current with previous output and I only have to accept or reject the diff. I don't have to write the expected response myself. Snapshots can also stub out parts of the response that are not determistic.
    - adelineJoOs 1y ago
      > Snapshots can also stub out parts of the response that are not determistic. TIL! The way I knew to do it was to have a mock implementation that behaved like the real thing, expect for data/time/uuids/..., where there was just a placeholder. Snapshot tests being able to "mask" those non-deterministic parts sounds cool!
  - adelineJoOs 1y ago
    tbh, that seems pretty close to what I would call snapshot testing already. What people usually do with it is using it for more broadly compared to API testing (for example, I currently use it to test snapshots of a TUI application I am developing) - i.e. you can use it whenever your test is of the form "I have something that I can print in some way and that should look the same until I explicitely want it to look differently in the future". There are a bit more bells and wizzles - For example, it is nice that one does not have to write the initial snapshots oneself. You write the test, execute, it creates the resulting file, then you review and commit that - handy little workflow!
- CommonGuy 1y ago
  We are working on snapshot testing for Kreya, expected to come in August. You might want to check it out :)
jicea 1y ago
Hi Hurl maintainer here, happy to answer any question and get feedbacks!
- airstrike 1y ago
  Arguably off-topic but I just want to say few naming choices give me more satisfaction than Hurl
- jiehong 1y ago
  Thanks a lot for maintaining it! Where do you see hurl in the next 2 years?
  - jicea 1y ago
    Obviously better IDEs integration, support for gRPC, Websocket would be very cool. A favorite of mine is to be available through official `apt`: there has been some work but it's kind of stuck. The Debian integration is the more difficult integration we have to deal. It's not Debian fault, there are a lot of documentation but we've struggled a lot and fail to understand the process. [1]: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/issues/366 https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/issues/366
    - akdev1l 1y ago
      Looks like you don’t have Fedora package either If I find time I could throw a spec file + ci/cd workflow to get you going that way too
- hiddew 1y ago
  Hurl is underappreciated for writing nice and maintainable HTTP-level test suites. Thanks for the tool!
- gavinray 1y ago
  So, myself and many folks I know have taken to writing tests in the form of ".http" files that can be executed by IDE extensions in VS Code/IDEA. Those basically go in the form POST http://localhost:8080/api/foo Content-Type: application/json { "some": "body" } And then we have a 1-to-1 mapping of "expected.json" outputs for integration tests. We use a bespoke bash script to run these .http file with cURL, and then compare the outputs with jq, log success/failure to console, and write "actual.json" Can I use HURL in a similar way? Essentially an IDE-runnable example HTTP request that references a JSON file as the expected output? And then run HURL over a directory of these files?
chvid 1y ago
Looks a bit like this: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... Which is a banger VS Code extension for all sorts of http xyz testing.
- krisgenre 1y ago
  IntelliJ has one too https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-code-editor.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
  - 7d24cbd0556f442 1y ago
    neovim has one, too! https://github.com/rest-nvim/rest.nvim https://github.com/rest-nvim/rest.nvim (After I have seen the IntelliJ one from a colleague I was searching for one like that in neovim. That's the best one I found. It's not perfect, but it works. Edit: The tool from OP looks very neat though. I will try it out. Might be a handy thing for a few prepared tests that I run frequently
  - vyskocilm 1y ago
    https://github.com/mistweaverco/kulala.nvim https://github.com/mistweaverco/kulala.nvim is an another restish (it can do gRPC to) plugin for neovim. It is intended to be compatible with a Jetbrains as much as possible.
- jiehong 1y ago
  Yep, just editor independent which is a huge deal IMO
  - lowwave 1y ago
    there is also Bruno and Bru seems quite similar this: https://docs.usebruno.com/bru-lang/overview https://docs.usebruno.com/bru-lang/overview It is targeted toward more postman crowd though. May not be as lightweight.
davidcalloway 1y ago
The main thing I find missing with hurl is an rc file.
- jicea 1y ago
  If you're thinking about `--netrc` like curl it's already here [1]. If you're thinking about a proper Hurl config file, it's coming! [1]: https://hurl.dev/docs/manual.html#netrc https://hurl.dev/docs/manual.html#netrc
the_arun 1y ago
Isn't this similar to HTTP Client tool available for IntelliJ? - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-code-editor.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
- resonious 1y ago
  Similar perhaps but not an IDE plugin.
  - HatchedLake721 1y ago
    It's available separately too https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/12/http-client-cli-run-requests-and-tests-on-ci/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/12/http-client-cli-run-...
zoidb 1y ago
This looks great, would definitely use it for testing if websocket support ever gets added https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/issues/1096 https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/issues/1096
antisceptic 1y ago
Is that POST in the readme sending the password in the query params? Is this shorthand or literally adding them to the params? I don't really feel the need for a curl replacement. In the past I've used httpie which is pretty slick but I end up falling back to writing tests in python using requests library. Maybe I'm not the target audience here, but I should still say something nice I guess. It's nice that it's written in Rust, and open source tooling is in need of fresh projects ever since everyone started bunkering up against the AI monolith scraping all their work. We should celebrate this kind of project, I just wish I had a use for it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ankitrgadiya 1y ago
  I see it more as a Postman replacement than curl. When I’m working on a set of APIs, I can quickly write a Hurl file with different combinations that I’m working on. There are usually editor integrations to run individual requests. Then I can share the same Hurl file to my team or commit it in the repo.
- tra3 1y ago
  Check out tavern if you’re in python-land. Pretty pleasant way to write declarative API tests.
- jicea 1y ago
  The POST in the README is going to send the params in the request body "url form encoded" like a form in a web page. There are more samples on the doc site [1]. Regarding curl, Hurl is just adding some syntax to pass data from request to request and add assert to responses. For a one time send & forget request, curl is the way, but if you've a kind of workflow (like accessing an authentified resource) Hurl is worth a try. Hurl uses libcurl under the hood and you've an option `--curl` to get a list of curl commands. [1]: https://hurl.dev/docs/samples.html https://hurl.dev/docs/samples.html
  - mrcarrot 1y ago
the_arun 1y ago
If I want to open a modal & check something, could it simulate clicking on open modal button? Or is it first level for now (without any support for interactions / javascript magic)
- jicea 1y ago
  Hurl works only on the HTTP layer, there is no JavaScript engine. If your modal open a form that will trigger some kind of XHR, you'll "simulate" the HTTP traquets that the form modal could have done. Hurl is not a kind of Playwright for instance.
gabesullice 1y ago
This looks awesome. I've searched for something like this many times and made a half dozen half-hearted attempts to build it too. Great job!
kaan_keskin 1y ago
this looks nice. is it possible to set a variable after a request and use it later in another request?
- mhio 1y ago
  Yeah... [Captures] csrf_token: xpath "normalize-space(//meta[@name='_csrf_token']/@content)" The use the name with mustaches {{csrf_token}} - https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html
  - kaan_keskin 1y ago
    i'm going to definitely give this a try. looks good
genericspammer 1y ago
Can you have different environments or profiles or whatever, with different global variables?
- DownGoat 1y ago
  Yes you can use env files, and then use the template syntax in the request files. https://hurl.dev/docs/templates.html#injecting-variables https://hurl.dev/docs/templates.html#injecting-variables
1a527dd5 1y ago
Yeah love Hurl, we stared using it back in 2023-09. We had a test suite using Runscope, I hated that changes weren't versioned controlled. Took a little grunt work and I converted them in Hurl (where were you AI?) and got rid of Runscope. Now we can see who made what change when and why. It's great.
- johns 1y ago
  I also hated that Runscope changes weren't version controlled :) We had started work on that but then things went sideways.
  - 1a527dd5 1y ago
    Oh wow, of course I would run into the founder of Runscope on here. Loved Runscope it served it's purpose until something came along that that offered the same + version control.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
QuiCasseRien 1y ago
interesting tool ! première fois que je vois qqch de cool sortir d'orange.
- jicea 1y ago
  Ah ah ah thanks for this! There are a lot of Open Source projects from Orange => https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource
lelanthran 1y ago
For automated testing I use hurl, but my personal dev roadmap is to create another tool. The deficiencies in huel with client state management is not easy to fix. What I'd like is full client state control with better variable management and use. For my last project I used Python to write the tests, which appears to work well initially. Dunno how well it will hold up for ongoing maintenance.
molszanski 1y ago
I am using it and I love it :)
joaopedroschmit 1y ago
[dead]
a57721 1y ago
In the JVM projects, I use Karate for integration tests: https://github.com/karatelabs/karate https://github.com/karatelabs/karate It gives you full control of constructing requests and assertions because test scenarios may include arbitrary JavaScript.
globular-toast 1y ago
Can you share "fixtures" amongst tests? For example, I wouldn't want to have to copy/paste the signup and login process for each type of user across hundreds of tests. What about test isolation? Are people using something else to "prime" the service before/after running these tests?
maxmarrfun 1y ago
[dead]
mdtrooper 1y ago
I love this kind of tools (easy, simple and cli). I remember that https://httpie.io/cli https://httpie.io/cli or https://jqlang.org/ https://jqlang.org/ .
lambda-science 1y ago
Isn't that very similar to Jetbrains HTTP Client ?
kalli 1y ago
This looks interesting. Longtime user of the Vscode-restclient, but have been moving over to httpyac lately for the scripting and cli use. Will take a look to see if hurl is a good fit. One annoying thing I've found in testing these tools is that a standard hasn't emerged for using the results of one request as input for another in the syntax of `.http` files. These three tools for instance have three different ways of doing it: * hurl uses `[Captures]` * Vscode-restclient does it by referencing request names in a variable declaration (like: `@token = {{loginAPI.response.body.token}}`). * While httpyac uses `@ref` syntax. From a quick round of testing it seems like using the syntax for one might break the other tools. [1]: https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html [2]: https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient [3]: https://httpyac.github.io/guide/metaData.html#ref-and-forceref https://httpyac.github.io/guide/metaData.html#ref-and-forcer...
- jicea 1y ago
  Guilty to have created yet-another-format for HTTP client! To "mitigate" this issue, you can use `hurlfmt` (distributed along `hurl`) that would allow you to export a Hurl file to JSON. You could then go from this JSON to another... It's not magic but it can help if you're going to change from Hurl to another thing.
  - kalli 1y ago
    No worries, it's also interesting to see different peoples approaches to the best syntax for this. Exporters/importers do make life a bit easier I suppose. I don't know what the mechanism/incentive for getting a standard would be either. Probably most likely would be if there was one clear "winner" that everyone else felt the need mirror. In any case, appreciate the reply and the tool. Good luck with it.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  What's really special is that Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio both have .HTTP files... which are incompatible with each other. Conway's Law in action, ladies and gentlemen.
epalm 1y ago
This is interesting. I’m wondering how programmable this is. Would this project (or any similar ones) be able to POST a json payload with a field set to “now()”?
blueflow 1y ago
Is there any program code that is not based on plain text? Punch cards maybe? For the value of "plain text" that includes a programming language with its own syntax and grammar, like Hurl.
hliyan 1y ago
I must say, the sample section[1] does an excellent job of making a case for the tool, especially to people who are inclined to make a snap judgement about the usefulness of the tool within the first 5 minutes (I'm sometimes guilty of this). [1] https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl?tab=readme-ov-file#samples https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl?tab=readme-ov-file...
yoavm 1y ago
The one thing I never understood about the Hurl format is why the response status code assertion happens at the request section and not under the `[Asserts]` section. I wonder what the rationale behind that is.
- jicea 1y ago
  A simple GET with a status code is just GET http://foo.com HTTP 200 You could write also GET http://foo.com HTTP * [Asserts] status == 200 HTTP serves as a marker of the response section
jorgeleo 1y ago
So we are not doing telnet anymore?
WhitneyLand 1y ago
One thing not really advertised about Claude Code is it makes all command line tools plain text/plain English. “Get data from the last log entry in <file> and post it to <url>”
perrygeo 1y ago
Hurl is awesome. A while back I ported a small web service from Python to Rust. Having rigorous tests of the public API is amazing; a language-independent integration test! I was able to swap it out with no changes to the public API or website. Worth mentioning that using Hurl in Rust specifically gives you a nice bonus feature: integration with cargo test tooling. Since Hurl is written in Rust, you can hook into hurl-the-library and reuse your .hurl files directly in your test suite. Demo: https://github.com/perrygeo/axum-hurl-test https://github.com/perrygeo/axum-hurl-test
twodave 1y ago
I took a lot of inspiration from this project when designing my own HTTP testing tool[0]. We needed to be able to run hundreds of tests quickly, and in parallel. If that is something you need and you like Hurl, then you might like Nap also. [0] https://naprun.dev https://naprun.dev
- bitpush 1y ago
  Is the config same/different/similar than hurl? Do you have a page that outlines the differences, if any?
  - twodave 1y ago
    The main difference is that nap works off of YAML. You can get an idea of how it works by clicking on "The Basics"[0] on the left-hand side of the page. [0] https://naprun.dev/the-basics/ https://naprun.dev/the-basics/
Thaxll 1y ago
It looks interesting, I had a look a the dependencies, 1.5k lines for a cli tool to test http calls ( and more ), is it the norm in Rust? https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/blob/master/Cargo.lock https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/blob/master/Cargo....
- ewpratten 1y ago
  You should probably be looking at the Cargo.toml file(s) (for direct dependencies at least) instead of the lock file as the lock file will include dependencies used for dev/testing.
dm03514 1y ago
I just started using hurl a couple months ago. For my uses it's great that it has both test suite mode and individual invocation mode. I use it to execute a test suite of HTTP requests against a service in CI. I'm not a super big fan of the configuration language, the blocks are not intuitive and I found some lacking in the documentation assertions that are supported. Overall the tool has been great, and has been extremely valuable. I started using interface testing when working on POCs. I found this helps with LLM-assisted development. Tests are written to directly exercise the HTTP methods, it allows for fluidity and evolution of the implementations as the project is evolving. I also found the separation of testing very helpful, and it further enforces the separation between interface and implementation. Before hurl, the tests I wrote would be written in the test framework of the language the service is written in. The hurl-based tests really help to enforce the "client" perspective. There is no backdoor data access or anything, just strict separation betwen interface, tests and implementation :)
- jicea 1y ago
  Maintainer here, thanks for the feedbacks. 6-7 years ago, when we started working on Hurl, we started with a JSON then a YAML file format. We gradually convinced ourself to write a new file format and I completely understand that it might feel weird. We tried (maybe not succeeded!) to have something simple for the simple case... I'm really interested by issues with the documentation: it can always be improved and any issues is welcome!
ninetyninenine 1y ago
This is cool, but also genuine question why this over some scripting language that can easily do http calls as well? I don’t think the DSL is significantly easier than a PL and it’s more limited to? Is it because of raw speed or ease of reading the DSL?
renegat0x0 1y ago
I created something different yet similar. You make GET request to server with any of supported crawlers and obtain result in JSON https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy/ https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy/ Supports request, selenium, Httpx, curl cffi, etc
zackify 1y ago
Oh wow! This reminds me so much of what I was trying to do almost 10 years ago but I was too much of a noob to make it make more sense haha. https://github.com/zackify/legible https://github.com/zackify/legible
cyri 1y ago
Nice. This looks way better than this one written in Go: https://github.com/vdobler/ht https://github.com/vdobler/ht it uses hjson. We used it very often a couple of years ago. Will try hurl.
jcmfernandes 1y ago
It's nice, and there's an emacs mode for it: https://github.com/JasZhe/hurl-mode https://github.com/JasZhe/hurl-mode
wiradikusuma 1y ago
IntelliJ has had this "plain text HTTP" feature for a while. I'm wondering if it is backed by Hurl?
- EricRiese 1y ago
  No, the IntelliJ HTTP Client / ijhttp is built on graaljs and lets you use arbitrary JavaScript for assertions and setup. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-cli.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-cli.html
manithree 1y ago
With nice editor integration (especially emacs), hurl is a good postman replacement. Kinda niche, but I wrapped libhurl to make it really easy to make an AWS Lambda availability monitor out of a hurl file https://gitlab.com/manithree/hurl_lambda https://gitlab.com/manithree/hurl_lambda
infogulch 1y ago
Hurl has been great for testing in my RAD templating web server project. Like dm03514 says itt, 'The hurl-based tests really help to enforce the "client" perspective.' It's packaged for 3 application environments including a docker image (x2 archs, x3 oses) and with Hurl its easy to ensure the tests pass at the client level in all three environments. It would be nice to have fancy-regex; today I tried to write a regex to match a case like this ~ <link href="/assets/reset.css\\?hash=(.*)" integrity="\\1" rel="stylesheet"> ~ but the regex crate (and thus hurl asserts) can't do backreferences so I guess I'll just live without checking that these two substrings match. I wish there was some way to test streamed updates / SSE. Basically, open a connection and wait, then run some other http requests, then assert the accumulated stream from the original connection. https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/discussions/2636 https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/discussions/2636
3eb7988a1663 1y ago
I think the idea is nice, but I am struggling for why I should use it. I write using Django, which has plenty of hooks for testing within the framework. Why switch to a tool which is blind to my backend and is going to create more work to keep in sync? At minimum, I lose the ability to easily drop into my debugger to inspect why a result went wrong. There is probably something to be said for keeping a hard boundary between the backend and testing code, but this would require more effort to create and maintain. I would still need to run the native test suite, so reaching out to an external tool feels a little weird. Unless it was just to ensure an API was fully generic enough for people to run their own clients against it.
- sorashi 1y ago
  It's just an alternative to Postman and similar so you don't have to start a whole damn electron window just to test a few http requests. It's somewhere between a curl script and Postman, so it hits the right spot for many.
- jicea 1y ago
  We used Hurl to go from a ktor web server to a spring boot rewrite (Java/Kotlin stack). It was a breeze to have a kind of specifications test suite independent of the server stack and helped us a lot in the transition. Another benefit is we built a Docker image for production and wanted to have something light and not tight to the implementation for integration tests.
- thiht 1y ago
  > Why switch to a tool which is blind to my backend and is going to create more work to keep in sync? At minimum, I lose the ability to easily drop into my debugger to inspect why a result went wrong. I don't use hurl but I've used other tools to write language agnostic API tests (and I'm currently working on a new one) so here's what I like about these kinds of tests: - they're blind to the implementation, and that's actually a pro in my opinion. It makes sure you don't rely on internals, you just get the input and the output - they can easily serve as documentation because they're language agnostic and relatively easy to share. They're great for sharing between teams in addition to or instead of an OpenAPI spec - they actually test a contract, and can be reused in case of a migration. I've worked on a huge migration of a public API from Perl to Go and we wanted to keep relatively the same contracts (since the API was public). So we wrote tests for the existing Perl API as a non-regression harness, and could keep the exact same tests for the Go API since they were independent from the language. Keeping the same tests gave us greater confidence than if we had to rewrite tests and it was easy to add more during the double-run/A-B test period - as a developer, writing these forces you to switch context and become a consumer of the API you just wrote, I've found it easier to write good quality tests with this method
johns 1y ago
Shout out to the OG Hurl HTTP tool https://web.archive.org/web/20100112040154/http://hurl.it/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100112040154/http://hurl.it/
kqr 1y ago
> It's somewhere between a curl script and Postman Sounds a lot like Emacs' restclient-mode, and I can absolutely see the appeal for those which don't already have an Emacs session open.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  As a Postman user, who uses Org Mode with Evil, can you sell me on Emacs' restclient-mode?
  - iLemming 1y ago
    You don't need to "buy" restclient, want you want is to understand Org-mode. Org-mode is a literate programming environment, you can run code snippets and "pipe" the results into one another. So, this is how I usually test my API endpoints - I would use ob-http, or verb.el, or restclient (although iirc this one no longer maintained) and then make a simple call to an endpoint, then I can pipe the results into a Clojure source block passing the data in, where I can easily parse the json and slice, dice, group and filter on the data. You can do the same thing in Python or Javascript or R (or whatever) source block. Then you can spit it out as is or pipe into another block for further tranformation. Very often I have to query a SQL DB to retrieve the payload I need to send to the API, that all I also do right there, in the same context. What's great is that all my experimentation is "reproducible", and all of it is in my notes. Notes that are easily searchable, exportable (e.g. for a blog content), etc. I can easily add links to some relevant PDFs, and youtube vids right there. I can start annotating those pdfs, where my notes will be interwoven with my API research. I can watch videos while controlling playback from Emacs, without having to switch to the app - it's very nice when taking notes. I can retrieve the transcript, send it to LLM, get the summary of the video and add it to my notes. If I come up with something that I'd like to memorize better, I can easily export chunks as Anki cards. That information is also within my notes. I can easily find it, edit it, etc. I don't need to navigate multiple different apps to get this work done.
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      Thank you. I didn't mean to literally sell me something, rather to explain it such that I would see how it could fit into my workflow. Which you did. I do use Org mode, but only for simple personal notes. When I get home I'll explore using it as a REST client. They always told me that Emacs is a great OS, that just lacks a decent text editor.
deepsun 1y ago
I believe it's built-in to IntelliJ, just create a file with .https extension.
- deepsun 1y ago
  I mean .http

461 points by flykespice 1y ago

Very interesting tool; I've done something quite similar by implementing a CLI-mode interpreter to VS Code Rest-client (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...) files, with a support of executing a test-code (Javascript) against the result of http operations. The idea was to have a tool which could run .http files in batch mode, and also to execute the selected set of http operations concurrently.

sanix-darker 1y ago

Is it me or, they took inspiration from : https://github.com/Sanix-Darker/dycow https://github.com/Sanix-Darker/dycow

laerus 1y ago

What's missing from Hurl is snapshot testing. After using `insta` for testing APIs, I cannot go back.

porker 1y ago
Is this https://insta.rs/ https://insta.rs/? What are the benefits you've found with snapshot testing?
- laerus 1y ago
  Greatly reduced boilerplate. Diffing snapshots and providing previews to accept or reject changes is also more robust and user friendly.
whilenot-dev 1y ago
What's your value proposition for snapshots and why can't that already be fulfilled with full body checks? https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl?tab=readme-ov-file#checking-full-body https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl?tab=readme-ov-file...
- laerus 1y ago
  Snapshots diff current with previous output and I only have to accept or reject the diff. I don't have to write the expected response myself. Snapshots can also stub out parts of the response that are not determistic.
  - adelineJoOs 1y ago
    > Snapshots can also stub out parts of the response that are not determistic. TIL! The way I knew to do it was to have a mock implementation that behaved like the real thing, expect for data/time/uuids/..., where there was just a placeholder. Snapshot tests being able to "mask" those non-deterministic parts sounds cool!
- adelineJoOs 1y ago
  tbh, that seems pretty close to what I would call snapshot testing already. What people usually do with it is using it for more broadly compared to API testing (for example, I currently use it to test snapshots of a TUI application I am developing) - i.e. you can use it whenever your test is of the form "I have something that I can print in some way and that should look the same until I explicitely want it to look differently in the future". There are a bit more bells and wizzles - For example, it is nice that one does not have to write the initial snapshots oneself. You write the test, execute, it creates the resulting file, then you review and commit that - handy little workflow!
CommonGuy 1y ago
We are working on snapshot testing for Kreya, expected to come in August. You might want to check it out :)

jicea 1y ago

Hi Hurl maintainer here, happy to answer any question and get feedbacks!

airstrike 1y ago
Arguably off-topic but I just want to say few naming choices give me more satisfaction than Hurl
jiehong 1y ago
Thanks a lot for maintaining it! Where do you see hurl in the next 2 years?
- jicea 1y ago
  Obviously better IDEs integration, support for gRPC, Websocket would be very cool. A favorite of mine is to be available through official `apt`: there has been some work but it's kind of stuck. The Debian integration is the more difficult integration we have to deal. It's not Debian fault, there are a lot of documentation but we've struggled a lot and fail to understand the process. [1]: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/issues/366 https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/issues/366
  - akdev1l 1y ago
    Looks like you don’t have Fedora package either If I find time I could throw a spec file + ci/cd workflow to get you going that way too
hiddew 1y ago
Hurl is underappreciated for writing nice and maintainable HTTP-level test suites. Thanks for the tool!
gavinray 1y ago
So, myself and many folks I know have taken to writing tests in the form of ".http" files that can be executed by IDE extensions in VS Code/IDEA. Those basically go in the form POST http://localhost:8080/api/foo Content-Type: application/json { "some": "body" } And then we have a 1-to-1 mapping of "expected.json" outputs for integration tests. We use a bespoke bash script to run these .http file with cURL, and then compare the outputs with jq, log success/failure to console, and write "actual.json" Can I use HURL in a similar way? Essentially an IDE-runnable example HTTP request that references a JSON file as the expected output? And then run HURL over a directory of these files?

chvid 1y ago

Looks a bit like this: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... Which is a banger VS Code extension for all sorts of http xyz testing.

krisgenre 1y ago
IntelliJ has one too https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-code-editor.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
- 7d24cbd0556f442 1y ago
  neovim has one, too! https://github.com/rest-nvim/rest.nvim https://github.com/rest-nvim/rest.nvim (After I have seen the IntelliJ one from a colleague I was searching for one like that in neovim. That's the best one I found. It's not perfect, but it works. Edit: The tool from OP looks very neat though. I will try it out. Might be a handy thing for a few prepared tests that I run frequently
- vyskocilm 1y ago
  https://github.com/mistweaverco/kulala.nvim https://github.com/mistweaverco/kulala.nvim is an another restish (it can do gRPC to) plugin for neovim. It is intended to be compatible with a Jetbrains as much as possible.
jiehong 1y ago
Yep, just editor independent which is a huge deal IMO
- lowwave 1y ago
  there is also Bruno and Bru seems quite similar this: https://docs.usebruno.com/bru-lang/overview https://docs.usebruno.com/bru-lang/overview It is targeted toward more postman crowd though. May not be as lightweight.

davidcalloway 1y ago

The main thing I find missing with hurl is an rc file.

jicea 1y ago
If you're thinking about `--netrc` like curl it's already here [1]. If you're thinking about a proper Hurl config file, it's coming! [1]: https://hurl.dev/docs/manual.html#netrc https://hurl.dev/docs/manual.html#netrc

the_arun 1y ago

Isn't this similar to HTTP Client tool available for IntelliJ? - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-code-editor.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...

resonious 1y ago
Similar perhaps but not an IDE plugin.
- HatchedLake721 1y ago
  It's available separately too https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/12/http-client-cli-run-requests-and-tests-on-ci/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/12/http-client-cli-run-...

zoidb 1y ago

This looks great, would definitely use it for testing if websocket support ever gets added https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/issues/1096 https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/issues/1096

antisceptic 1y ago

Is that POST in the readme sending the password in the query params? Is this shorthand or literally adding them to the params? I don't really feel the need for a curl replacement. In the past I've used httpie which is pretty slick but I end up falling back to writing tests in python using requests library. Maybe I'm not the target audience here, but I should still say something nice I guess. It's nice that it's written in Rust, and open source tooling is in need of fresh projects ever since everyone started bunkering up against the AI monolith scraping all their work. We should celebrate this kind of project, I just wish I had a use for it.

deleted 1y ago
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ankitrgadiya 1y ago
I see it more as a Postman replacement than curl. When I’m working on a set of APIs, I can quickly write a Hurl file with different combinations that I’m working on. There are usually editor integrations to run individual requests. Then I can share the same Hurl file to my team or commit it in the repo.
tra3 1y ago
Check out tavern if you’re in python-land. Pretty pleasant way to write declarative API tests.
jicea 1y ago
The POST in the README is going to send the params in the request body "url form encoded" like a form in a web page. There are more samples on the doc site [1]. Regarding curl, Hurl is just adding some syntax to pass data from request to request and add assert to responses. For a one time send & forget request, curl is the way, but if you've a kind of workflow (like accessing an authentified resource) Hurl is worth a try. Hurl uses libcurl under the hood and you've an option `--curl` to get a list of curl commands. [1]: https://hurl.dev/docs/samples.html https://hurl.dev/docs/samples.html
- mrcarrot 1y ago

the_arun 1y ago

If I want to open a modal & check something, could it simulate clicking on open modal button? Or is it first level for now (without any support for interactions / javascript magic)

jicea 1y ago
Hurl works only on the HTTP layer, there is no JavaScript engine. If your modal open a form that will trigger some kind of XHR, you'll "simulate" the HTTP traquets that the form modal could have done. Hurl is not a kind of Playwright for instance.

gabesullice 1y ago

This looks awesome. I've searched for something like this many times and made a half dozen half-hearted attempts to build it too. Great job!

kaan_keskin 1y ago

this looks nice. is it possible to set a variable after a request and use it later in another request?

mhio 1y ago
Yeah... [Captures] csrf_token: xpath "normalize-space(//meta[@name='_csrf_token']/@content)" The use the name with mustaches {{csrf_token}} - https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html
- kaan_keskin 1y ago
  i'm going to definitely give this a try. looks good

genericspammer 1y ago

Can you have different environments or profiles or whatever, with different global variables?

DownGoat 1y ago
Yes you can use env files, and then use the template syntax in the request files. https://hurl.dev/docs/templates.html#injecting-variables https://hurl.dev/docs/templates.html#injecting-variables

1a527dd5 1y ago

Yeah love Hurl, we stared using it back in 2023-09. We had a test suite using Runscope, I hated that changes weren't versioned controlled. Took a little grunt work and I converted them in Hurl (where were you AI?) and got rid of Runscope. Now we can see who made what change when and why. It's great.

johns 1y ago
I also hated that Runscope changes weren't version controlled :) We had started work on that but then things went sideways.
- 1a527dd5 1y ago
  Oh wow, of course I would run into the founder of Runscope on here. Loved Runscope it served it's purpose until something came along that that offered the same + version control.

deleted 1y ago

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QuiCasseRien 1y ago

interesting tool ! première fois que je vois qqch de cool sortir d'orange.

jicea 1y ago
Ah ah ah thanks for this! There are a lot of Open Source projects from Orange => https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource

lelanthran 1y ago

For automated testing I use hurl, but my personal dev roadmap is to create another tool. The deficiencies in huel with client state management is not easy to fix. What I'd like is full client state control with better variable management and use. For my last project I used Python to write the tests, which appears to work well initially. Dunno how well it will hold up for ongoing maintenance.

molszanski 1y ago

I am using it and I love it :)

joaopedroschmit 1y ago

[dead]

a57721 1y ago

In the JVM projects, I use Karate for integration tests: https://github.com/karatelabs/karate https://github.com/karatelabs/karate It gives you full control of constructing requests and assertions because test scenarios may include arbitrary JavaScript.

globular-toast 1y ago

Can you share "fixtures" amongst tests? For example, I wouldn't want to have to copy/paste the signup and login process for each type of user across hundreds of tests. What about test isolation? Are people using something else to "prime" the service before/after running these tests?

maxmarrfun 1y ago

[dead]

mdtrooper 1y ago

I love this kind of tools (easy, simple and cli). I remember that https://httpie.io/cli https://httpie.io/cli or https://jqlang.org/ https://jqlang.org/ .

lambda-science 1y ago

Isn't that very similar to Jetbrains HTTP Client ?

kalli 1y ago

This looks interesting. Longtime user of the Vscode-restclient, but have been moving over to httpyac lately for the scripting and cli use. Will take a look to see if hurl is a good fit. One annoying thing I've found in testing these tools is that a standard hasn't emerged for using the results of one request as input for another in the syntax of `.http` files. These three tools for instance have three different ways of doing it: * hurl uses `[Captures]` * Vscode-restclient does it by referencing request names in a variable declaration (like: `@token = {{loginAPI.response.body.token}}`). * While httpyac uses `@ref` syntax. From a quick round of testing it seems like using the syntax for one might break the other tools. [1]: https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html https://hurl.dev/docs/capturing-response.html [2]: https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient [3]: https://httpyac.github.io/guide/metaData.html#ref-and-forceref https://httpyac.github.io/guide/metaData.html#ref-and-forcer...

jicea 1y ago
Guilty to have created yet-another-format for HTTP client! To "mitigate" this issue, you can use `hurlfmt` (distributed along `hurl`) that would allow you to export a Hurl file to JSON. You could then go from this JSON to another... It's not magic but it can help if you're going to change from Hurl to another thing.
- kalli 1y ago
  No worries, it's also interesting to see different peoples approaches to the best syntax for this. Exporters/importers do make life a bit easier I suppose. I don't know what the mechanism/incentive for getting a standard would be either. Probably most likely would be if there was one clear "winner" that everyone else felt the need mirror. In any case, appreciate the reply and the tool. Good luck with it.
jiggawatts 1y ago
What's really special is that Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio both have .HTTP files... which are incompatible with each other. Conway's Law in action, ladies and gentlemen.

epalm 1y ago

This is interesting. I’m wondering how programmable this is. Would this project (or any similar ones) be able to POST a json payload with a field set to “now()”?

blueflow 1y ago

Is there any program code that is not based on plain text? Punch cards maybe? For the value of "plain text" that includes a programming language with its own syntax and grammar, like Hurl.

hliyan 1y ago

I must say, the sample section[1] does an excellent job of making a case for the tool, especially to people who are inclined to make a snap judgement about the usefulness of the tool within the first 5 minutes (I'm sometimes guilty of this). [1] https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl?tab=readme-ov-file#samples https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl?tab=readme-ov-file...

yoavm 1y ago

The one thing I never understood about the Hurl format is why the response status code assertion happens at the request section and not under the `[Asserts]` section. I wonder what the rationale behind that is.

jicea 1y ago
A simple GET with a status code is just GET http://foo.com HTTP 200 You could write also GET http://foo.com HTTP * [Asserts] status == 200 HTTP serves as a marker of the response section

jorgeleo 1y ago

So we are not doing telnet anymore?

WhitneyLand 1y ago

One thing not really advertised about Claude Code is it makes all command line tools plain text/plain English. “Get data from the last log entry in <file> and post it to <url>”

perrygeo 1y ago

Hurl is awesome. A while back I ported a small web service from Python to Rust. Having rigorous tests of the public API is amazing; a language-independent integration test! I was able to swap it out with no changes to the public API or website. Worth mentioning that using Hurl in Rust specifically gives you a nice bonus feature: integration with cargo test tooling. Since Hurl is written in Rust, you can hook into hurl-the-library and reuse your .hurl files directly in your test suite. Demo: https://github.com/perrygeo/axum-hurl-test https://github.com/perrygeo/axum-hurl-test

twodave 1y ago

I took a lot of inspiration from this project when designing my own HTTP testing tool[0]. We needed to be able to run hundreds of tests quickly, and in parallel. If that is something you need and you like Hurl, then you might like Nap also. [0] https://naprun.dev https://naprun.dev

bitpush 1y ago
Is the config same/different/similar than hurl? Do you have a page that outlines the differences, if any?
- twodave 1y ago
  The main difference is that nap works off of YAML. You can get an idea of how it works by clicking on "The Basics"[0] on the left-hand side of the page. [0] https://naprun.dev/the-basics/ https://naprun.dev/the-basics/

Thaxll 1y ago

It looks interesting, I had a look a the dependencies, 1.5k lines for a cli tool to test http calls ( and more ), is it the norm in Rust? https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/blob/master/Cargo.lock https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/blob/master/Cargo....

ewpratten 1y ago
You should probably be looking at the Cargo.toml file(s) (for direct dependencies at least) instead of the lock file as the lock file will include dependencies used for dev/testing.

dm03514 1y ago

I just started using hurl a couple months ago. For my uses it's great that it has both test suite mode and individual invocation mode. I use it to execute a test suite of HTTP requests against a service in CI. I'm not a super big fan of the configuration language, the blocks are not intuitive and I found some lacking in the documentation assertions that are supported. Overall the tool has been great, and has been extremely valuable. I started using interface testing when working on POCs. I found this helps with LLM-assisted development. Tests are written to directly exercise the HTTP methods, it allows for fluidity and evolution of the implementations as the project is evolving. I also found the separation of testing very helpful, and it further enforces the separation between interface and implementation. Before hurl, the tests I wrote would be written in the test framework of the language the service is written in. The hurl-based tests really help to enforce the "client" perspective. There is no backdoor data access or anything, just strict separation betwen interface, tests and implementation :)

jicea 1y ago
Maintainer here, thanks for the feedbacks. 6-7 years ago, when we started working on Hurl, we started with a JSON then a YAML file format. We gradually convinced ourself to write a new file format and I completely understand that it might feel weird. We tried (maybe not succeeded!) to have something simple for the simple case... I'm really interested by issues with the documentation: it can always be improved and any issues is welcome!

ninetyninenine 1y ago

This is cool, but also genuine question why this over some scripting language that can easily do http calls as well? I don’t think the DSL is significantly easier than a PL and it’s more limited to? Is it because of raw speed or ease of reading the DSL?

renegat0x0 1y ago

I created something different yet similar. You make GET request to server with any of supported crawlers and obtain result in JSON https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy/ https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy/ Supports request, selenium, Httpx, curl cffi, etc

zackify 1y ago

Oh wow! This reminds me so much of what I was trying to do almost 10 years ago but I was too much of a noob to make it make more sense haha. https://github.com/zackify/legible https://github.com/zackify/legible

cyri 1y ago

Nice. This looks way better than this one written in Go: https://github.com/vdobler/ht https://github.com/vdobler/ht it uses hjson. We used it very often a couple of years ago. Will try hurl.

jcmfernandes 1y ago

It's nice, and there's an emacs mode for it: https://github.com/JasZhe/hurl-mode https://github.com/JasZhe/hurl-mode

wiradikusuma 1y ago

IntelliJ has had this "plain text HTTP" feature for a while. I'm wondering if it is backed by Hurl?

EricRiese 1y ago
No, the IntelliJ HTTP Client / ijhttp is built on graaljs and lets you use arbitrary JavaScript for assertions and setup. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-cli.html https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-cli.html

manithree 1y ago

With nice editor integration (especially emacs), hurl is a good postman replacement. Kinda niche, but I wrapped libhurl to make it really easy to make an AWS Lambda availability monitor out of a hurl file https://gitlab.com/manithree/hurl_lambda https://gitlab.com/manithree/hurl_lambda

infogulch 1y ago

Hurl has been great for testing in my RAD templating web server project. Like dm03514 says itt, 'The hurl-based tests really help to enforce the "client" perspective.' It's packaged for 3 application environments including a docker image (x2 archs, x3 oses) and with Hurl its easy to ensure the tests pass at the client level in all three environments. It would be nice to have fancy-regex; today I tried to write a regex to match a case like this ~ <link href="/assets/reset.css\\?hash=(.*)" integrity="\\1" rel="stylesheet"> ~ but the regex crate (and thus hurl asserts) can't do backreferences so I guess I'll just live without checking that these two substrings match. I wish there was some way to test streamed updates / SSE. Basically, open a connection and wait, then run some other http requests, then assert the accumulated stream from the original connection. https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/discussions/2636 https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/hurl/discussions/2636

3eb7988a1663 1y ago

I think the idea is nice, but I am struggling for why I should use it. I write using Django, which has plenty of hooks for testing within the framework. Why switch to a tool which is blind to my backend and is going to create more work to keep in sync? At minimum, I lose the ability to easily drop into my debugger to inspect why a result went wrong. There is probably something to be said for keeping a hard boundary between the backend and testing code, but this would require more effort to create and maintain. I would still need to run the native test suite, so reaching out to an external tool feels a little weird. Unless it was just to ensure an API was fully generic enough for people to run their own clients against it.

sorashi 1y ago
It's just an alternative to Postman and similar so you don't have to start a whole damn electron window just to test a few http requests. It's somewhere between a curl script and Postman, so it hits the right spot for many.
jicea 1y ago
We used Hurl to go from a ktor web server to a spring boot rewrite (Java/Kotlin stack). It was a breeze to have a kind of specifications test suite independent of the server stack and helped us a lot in the transition. Another benefit is we built a Docker image for production and wanted to have something light and not tight to the implementation for integration tests.
thiht 1y ago
> Why switch to a tool which is blind to my backend and is going to create more work to keep in sync? At minimum, I lose the ability to easily drop into my debugger to inspect why a result went wrong. I don't use hurl but I've used other tools to write language agnostic API tests (and I'm currently working on a new one) so here's what I like about these kinds of tests: - they're blind to the implementation, and that's actually a pro in my opinion. It makes sure you don't rely on internals, you just get the input and the output - they can easily serve as documentation because they're language agnostic and relatively easy to share. They're great for sharing between teams in addition to or instead of an OpenAPI spec - they actually test a contract, and can be reused in case of a migration. I've worked on a huge migration of a public API from Perl to Go and we wanted to keep relatively the same contracts (since the API was public). So we wrote tests for the existing Perl API as a non-regression harness, and could keep the exact same tests for the Go API since they were independent from the language. Keeping the same tests gave us greater confidence than if we had to rewrite tests and it was easy to add more during the double-run/A-B test period - as a developer, writing these forces you to switch context and become a consumer of the API you just wrote, I've found it easier to write good quality tests with this method

johns 1y ago

Shout out to the OG Hurl HTTP tool https://web.archive.org/web/20100112040154/http://hurl.it/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100112040154/http://hurl.it/

kqr 1y ago

> It's somewhere between a curl script and Postman Sounds a lot like Emacs' restclient-mode, and I can absolutely see the appeal for those which don't already have an Emacs session open.

dotancohen 1y ago
As a Postman user, who uses Org Mode with Evil, can you sell me on Emacs' restclient-mode?
- iLemming 1y ago
  You don't need to "buy" restclient, want you want is to understand Org-mode. Org-mode is a literate programming environment, you can run code snippets and "pipe" the results into one another. So, this is how I usually test my API endpoints - I would use ob-http, or verb.el, or restclient (although iirc this one no longer maintained) and then make a simple call to an endpoint, then I can pipe the results into a Clojure source block passing the data in, where I can easily parse the json and slice, dice, group and filter on the data. You can do the same thing in Python or Javascript or R (or whatever) source block. Then you can spit it out as is or pipe into another block for further tranformation. Very often I have to query a SQL DB to retrieve the payload I need to send to the API, that all I also do right there, in the same context. What's great is that all my experimentation is "reproducible", and all of it is in my notes. Notes that are easily searchable, exportable (e.g. for a blog content), etc. I can easily add links to some relevant PDFs, and youtube vids right there. I can start annotating those pdfs, where my notes will be interwoven with my API research. I can watch videos while controlling playback from Emacs, without having to switch to the app - it's very nice when taking notes. I can retrieve the transcript, send it to LLM, get the summary of the video and add it to my notes. If I come up with something that I'd like to memorize better, I can easily export chunks as Anki cards. That information is also within my notes. I can easily find it, edit it, etc. I don't need to navigate multiple different apps to get this work done.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    Thank you. I didn't mean to literally sell me something, rather to explain it such that I would see how it could fit into my workflow. Which you did. I do use Org mode, but only for simple personal notes. When I get home I'll explore using it as a REST client. They always told me that Emacs is a great OS, that just lacks a decent text editor.

deepsun 1y ago

I believe it's built-in to IntelliJ, just create a file with .https extension.

deepsun 1y ago
I mean .http