Show HN: A Swiss army knife for testing HTTP from the terminal

Bombardier is cool, but serves a very different use case.

I mentioned elsewhere in the comments that we have a Docker image, and are working on other methods of installing the CLI to alleviate some of these dependency-related concerns.

Getting side tracked here, but there seems to be a common sentiment when it comes to Node.js that it's uniquely insecure. Node.js has indeed had some unfortunate press when it comes to supply-chain security, but every other runtime is susceptible to those attacks (PiPy, Gems, Maven, Rust Crates). Ultimately of course, if you choose to avoid using any software built on top of those stacks, that's your choice.

Artillery specifically is no different to any other Node.js-based project in how large the dependency tree is. VSCode for instance is used by millions of developers has 1.6k dependencies [1].

1. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/network/dependencies

thank you! we just grab the timings info for the request from the underlying HTTP library, and sprinkle some ASCII art on top. That part was inspired by httpstat [1]

We want to extend those with support for Server-Timing next, and also Core Web Vitals [3] (via Playwright) for web pages.

1. https://github.com/reorx/httpstat

2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Se...

3. https://web.dev/vitals/

A few things :)

Syntax highlighting

Request performance waterfalls

Built-in JMESPath queries for JSON (same syntax as in AWS CLI). XML and HTML can be queried too.

Ability to set checks on the response. This one is super handy for quick acceptance tests.

> Think mini-curl with better UX for common use-cases, plus a couple of extra features.

> it looks like you need to install 1276 npm dependencies to use this tool

Sincere question (probably highlights my lack of understanding Node package management): how can this be a "mini" curl with that many dependencies?

1276 deps... how is that even possible for a simple HTTP fetcher. Does node have no standard library? actually amazing.

This is essentially what I was referring to with my comment below. If you can improve the installation experience such that I don't have to care that you developed with node.js, so much the better. If I were a node.js developer I surely wouldn't want my global package name space polluted like that.

npm is not for end users.

sure, that’s a valid concern in some environments. fwiw we use Snyk.io for dependency scanning

honest question to the authors: why cannot this tool not be written in JavaScript?

what technically prevents you from designing the tool independent of the Node.JS and JavaScript ecosystem?

> Have a better installation story like a single executable.

Holy guacamole this is an entitled sentiment. It’s an open source project and it’s free.

if you’re on a Mac, Artillery has a Homebrew formula too. We have an official Docker image too. Other ways of installing are on the roadmap too (self contained tarballs and binaries).

As to what it does better than curl/wget. Probe is geared towards interactive use with HTTP APIs. So you get syntax highlighting and pretty printing for JSON, built-in querying, request waterfall visualizations, and ability to set expectations on every response.

HTTP/2 is supported.

> what does this do that curl, wget, et al do not

they don’t get VC-funded by YCombinator, do they?

/s

What makes this a worse "installation story" than e.g.

apt install, pip install, git clone && ./configure && make && make install?

Sure, if you've got muscle memory for all the flags (plus it lets you reason about all the other programs that pipe stuff to curl). I personally find myself using httpie [1] at least as much.

1: https://httpie.io/

The big win with curl is the growing adoption of "copy as curl" in browser dev tools as well as "example of API call in curl" for third party API documentation.

I don't think I could move to anything else for that reason alone.

curl is amazing! I love curl. This is not meant to replace it completely. Probe just makes those most common use-cases friendlier, like looking at headers, or inspecting JSON retuned by an API with syntax highlighting, or querying without needing to reach for jq etc.

In Emacs, I found the restclient plugin quite useful. https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

I imagine other editors have similar plugins.