curl-runnings

Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up, it's testing time! curl-runnings!

A common form of black-box API testing boils down to simply making requests to an endpoint and verifying properties of the response. curl-runnings aims to make writing tests like this fast and easy.

curl-runnings is a framework for writing declarative tests for your APIs in a fashion equivalent to performing curls and verifying the responses. Write your tests quickly and correctly with a straight-forward specification in Dhall, yaml, or json that can encode simple but powerful matchers against responses.

Alternatively, you can use the curl-runnings library to write your tests in Haskell (though a Haskell setup is absolutely not required to use this tool).

Installing

The best way to install curl-runnings is with the scarf package manager.

# If you don't have scarf, you can easily install it with:
$ curl -L https://scarf.sh/install | bash
 
$ scarf install curl-runnings

Binaries are available on the Releases section of the GitHub page.

You can also compile from source with stack.

Writing a test specification

Curl runnings tests are just data! A test spec is an object containing an array of cases, where each item represents a single curl and set of assertions about the response. Write your tests specs in a Dhall, yaml or json file. Note: the legacy format of a top level array of test cases is still supported, but may not be in future releases.

let JSON = https://prelude.dhall-lang.org/JSON/package.dhall

let CurlRunnings = ./dhall/curl-runnings.dhall

in   CurlRunnings.hydrateCase
        CurlRunnings.Case::{
        , expectData = Some
            ( CurlRunnings.ExpectData.Exactly
                ( JSON.object
                    [ { mapKey = "okay", mapValue = JSON.bool True },
                      { mapKey = "message", mapValue = JSON.string "a message" }]
                )
            )
        , expectStatus = 200
        , name = "test 1"
        , requestMethod = CurlRunnings.HttpMethod.GET
        , url = "http://your-endpoing.com/status"
        }

---
# example-test.yaml
#
# specify all your test cases as an array keys on `cases`
cases:
  - name: A curl runnings test case
    url: http://your-endpoint.com/status
    requestMethod: GET
    # Specify the json payload we expect here
    expectData:
      # The 1 key in this object specifies the matcher we want
      # to use to test the returned payload. In this case, we
      # require the payload is exactly what we specify.
      exactly:
        okay: true
        msg: 'a message'
    # Assertions about the returned status code. Pass in
    # an acceptable code or list of codes
    expectStatus: 200

See /examples for more example curl runnings specifications, which walk through some of the other features that can be encoded in your tests such as:

• reference data from previous responses of previous test cases
• reference environment variables
• various easy-to-use json matchers
• support for importing data from other yaml files in your spec

Running

Once you've written a spec, simply run it with:

curl-runnings -f path/to/your/spec.yaml

(hint: try using the --verbose flag for more output)

If all your tests pass, curl-runnings will cleanly exit with a 0 code. A code of 1 will be returned if any tests failed.

You can also select specific test cases by filtering via regex by using the --grep flag. Just make sure your case isn't referencing data from previous examples that won't get run!

For more info:

curl-runnings --help

Running With Docker

A dockerfile is included in the root of the project. The Dockerfile will expect the linux based curl-runnings executable in the same directory as the Dockerfile and a tests.yml file. You can download the latest executable from the release page : https://github.com/aviaviavi/curl-runnings/releases .

docker build . -t curl-runnings-tests

docker run curl-runnings-tests

If you use docker-compose, you can add this to docker-compose.yml:

tests:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: ./Dockerfile

Contributing

Contributions in any form are welcome and encouraged. Don't be shy! :D