Hurl: Run and test HTTP requests with plain text
56 comments
·June 20, 20251a527dd5
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.
a57721
In the JVM projects, I use Karate for integration tests: https://github.com/karatelabs/karate
It gives you full control of constructing requests and assertions because test scenarios may include arbitrary JavaScript.
jicea
Hi Hurl maintainer here, happy to answer any question and get feedbacks!
gavinray
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" }
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?
hiddew
Hurl is underappreciated for writing nice and maintainable HTTP-level test suites. Thanks for the tool!
LadyCailin
Can you organize with the VSCode rest client folk(s?) to come up with a standard for http files?
jiehong
Thanks a lot for maintaining it!
Where do you see hurl in the next 2 years?
jicea
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.
lambda-science
Isn't that very similar to Jetbrains HTTP Client ?
chvid
Looks a bit like this:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...
Which is a banger VS Code extension for all sorts of http xyz testing.
jiehong
Yep, just editor independent which is a huge deal IMO
lowwave
there is also Bruno and Bru seems quite similar this: https://docs.usebruno.com/bru-lang/overview
It is targeted toward more postman crowd though. May not be as lightweight.
LadyCailin
It’s not nearly as lightweight, and one of the major dealbreakers for postman and equivalents (even ignoring all the drama with postman) is that you have to import and export the data in the client in order to get some text file you can just commit to repo. For my team, that’s a dealbreaker, because it means that people write entire suites of stuff, and never commit them, meaning other people end up doing the same work over and over.
krisgenre
IntelliJ has one too https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
vyskocilm
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.
7d24cbd0556f442
neovim has one, too! 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
mcescalante
yep, I've played with Hurl and find it nice but recently have been leaning into the .http stuff more. IntelliJ has it built in, there's the plugin you linked, and then for CLI i've used httpYac. No "vendor lock in", really easy to share with copy & paste or source control.
gotimo
+1 On HttpYac, it's been really nice to get started with and growing into a more powerful API testing suite over time
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mdtrooper
I love this kind of tools (easy, simple and cli). I remember that https://httpie.io/cli or https://jqlang.org/ .
laerus
What's missing from Hurl is snapshot testing. After using `insta` for testing APIs, I cannot go back.
porker
Is this https://insta.rs/? What are the benefits you've found with snapshot testing?
laerus
Greatly reduced boilerplate. Diffing snapshots and providing previews to accept or reject changes is also more robust and user friendly.
whilenot-dev
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...
laerus
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
> 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!
CommonGuy
We are working on snapshot testing for Kreya, expected to come in August. You might want to check it out :)
lelanthran
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.
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antisceptic
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.
jicea
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.
mrcarrot
> 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.
Is there a different POST request in the readme or are you saying that this example is going to send the "user" and "password" params in the request body?
> POST https://example.org/login?user=toto&password=1234
That seems really surprising to me - how would you then send a POST request that includes query string parameters? The documentation on form parameters [1] suggests there's an explicit syntax for sending form-encoded request parameters
jicea
Ah sorry for both, the README sample is here from the start (4 years) ago that I didn't take time to read it with a fresh eye:
POST https://acmecorp.net/login?user=toto&password=1234
POST https://acmecorp.net/login
[Form]
user: toto
password: 1234
ankitrgadiya
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
Check out tavern if you’re in python-land. Pretty pleasant way to write declarative API tests.
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the_arun
Isn't this similar to HTTP Client tool available for IntelliJ? - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
resonious
Similar perhaps but not an IDE plugin.
HatchedLake721
It's available separately too
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/12/http-client-cli-run-...
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
[2]: https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient
[3]: https://httpyac.github.io/guide/metaData.html#ref-and-forcer...