Hurl as an alternative to Postman
Posted by Pete McBreen 05 Oct 2021 at 19:50
Hurl is a Rust wrapper around libcurl that provides an easier to use interface to Curl. Not a replacement for Playwright, but for testing a JSON REST endpoint or validating the server side of HTML web pages it looks to have a place in the toolkit.
It is controlled either from stdin or files with a nice syntax
GET https://improvingwetware.com/
# confirm response code
HTTP/1.1 200
[Asserts]
xpath "//div[@class='post']" count == 20 # confirm 20 posts per page
[Captures]
nextPage: xpath "string(//span[@class='next']/a/@href)" # get href to the next page
GET https://improvingwetware.com{{nextPage}} # use captured href to navigate to that page
HTTP/1.1 200 # and make sure we found that page
[Asserts]
xpath "//div[@class='post']" count == 20
Only gotcha is that you might need to have an XPath Cheatsheet link handy if you have not needed XPath much for navigation around a web page (I mainly use CSS selectors for Selenium and Playwright)
>hurl test.hurl --test
test.hurl: running [1/1]
test.hurl: success
executed: 1
success: 1 (100.0%)
failed: 0 (0.0%)
execution time: 1156ms
Note. If you are running under windows command prompt, you cannot use the normal wildcard to specify multiple files, as it assumes that the wildcard will be expanded by the OS. Fix is to run under WSL
>hurl *.hurl --test
error: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. (os error 123)
Under WSL there are no issues as it expands the wildcards automatically
$ ./hurl.exe *.hurl --test
t2.hurl: running [1/2]
t2.hurl: success
test.hurl: running [2/2]
test.hurl: success
executed: 2
success: 2 (100.0%)
failed: 0 (0.0%)
execution time: 2132ms