Like unit testing, for performance

A modern load testing tool for developers and testers in the DevOps era.

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k6 is a modern load testing tool, building on Load Impact's years of experience in the load and performance testing industry. It provides a clean, approachable scripting API, local and cloud execution, with command & control through CLI or a REST API.

This is how load testing should look in the 21st century.

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• Features
• Install
• Quick Start
• Need help or want to contribute?

Features

• Scripting in ES6 JS: support for modules to aid code reusability across an organization
• Everything as code: test logic and configuration options are both in JS for version control friendliness
• Automation-friendly: checks (like asserts) and thresholds
• HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and WebSocket protocol support
• TLS features: client certificates, configurable SSL/TLS versions and ciphers
• Batteries included: Cookies, Crypto, Custom metrics, Encodings, Environment variables, JSON, HTML forms and more.
• Flexible metrics storage/visualization: InfluxDB (+Grafana), JSON or Load Impact Insights

There's even more! See all features available in k6.

Install

Mac

brew tap loadimpact/k6
brew install k6

Other Platforms

Grab a prebuilt binary from the Releases page.

Install the binary in your PATH to run k6 from any location.

Docker

docker pull loadimpact/k6

Build from source

To build from source you need Git and Go (1.8 or newer). Follow these instructions:

• Run go get github.com/loadimpact/k6 which will:
  • git clone the repo and put the source in $GOPATH/src/github.com/loadimpact/k6
  • build a k6 binary and put it in $GOPATH/bin
• Make sure you have $GOPATH/bin in your PATH
• Tada, you can now run k6 using k6 run script.js

Quick start

k6 works with the concept of virtual users (VUs), which run scripts - they're essentially glorified, parallel while(true) loops. Scripts are written using JavaScript, as ES6 modules, which allows you to break larger tests into smaller and more reusable pieces, which makes it easy to scale across an organization.

Scripts must contain, at the very least, a default function - this defines the entry point for your VUs, similar to the main() function in many other languages:

export default function() {
    // do things here...
}

"Why not just run my script normally, from top to bottom", you might ask - the answer is: we do, but code inside and outside your default function can do different things.

Code inside default is called "VU code", and is run over and over for as long as the test is running. Code outside of it is called "init code", and is run only once per VU.

VU code can make HTTP requests, emit metrics, and generally do everything you'd expect a load test to do - with a few important exceptions: you can't load anything from your local filesystem, or import any other modules. This all has to be done from init code.

There are two reasons for this. The first is, of course: performance.

If you read a file from disk on every single script iteration, it'd be needlessly slow; even if you cache the contents of the file and any imported modules, it'd mean the first run of the script would be much slower than all the others. Worse yet, if you have a script that imports or loads things based on things that can only be known at runtime, you'd get slow iterations thrown in every time you load something new.

But there's another, more interesting reason. By forcing all imports and file reads into the init context, we design for distributed execution. We know which files will be needed, so we distribute only those files. We know which modules will be imported, so we can bundle them up from the get-go. And, tying into the performance point above, the other nodes don't even need writable filesystems - everything can be kept in-memory.

As an added bonus, you can use this to reuse data between iterations (but only for the same VU):

var counter = 0;

export default function() {
    counter++;
}

Running k6

First, create a k6 script to describe what the virtual users should do in your load test:

import http from "k6/http";

export default function() {
  http.get("http://test.loadimpact.com");
};

Save it as script.js, then run k6 like this:

k6 run script.js

(Note that if you use the Docker image, the command is slightly different: docker run -i loadimpact/k6 run - <script.js)

For more information on how to get started running k6, please look at the Running k6 documentation. If you want more info on the scripting API or results output, you'll find that also on https://docs.k6.io.

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Need help or want to contribute?

Types of questions and where to ask:

• How do I? -- Stack Overflow (use tags: k6, javascript, load-testing)
• I got this error, why? -- Stack Overflow
• I got this error and I'm sure it's a bug -- file an issue
• I have an idea/request -- file an issue
• Why do you? -- Slack
• When will you? -- Slack
• I want to contribute/help with development -- Start by reading CONTRIBUTING.md, then Slack and issues