Flood Element is a browser based load generation tool built on top of Puppeteer. It provides an easy to use set of commands for automating most user interfaces, including mouse actions such as click and drag, keyboard key press actions, and working with inputs, buttons, and menus.
Element is designed purely to generate load by simulating real user behaviour within a browser. It does not attempt to manipulate the page or work with any specific front-end framework, although it works great for testing SPAs built in React, Angular, Ember, or any other JS heavy client framework.
The goals of Element scripts are to be:
- Understandable
- Easy to write and maintain
- Declarative for expressing user actions
Scaling up Element tests is easy on Flood, by launching hundreds or even thousands of instances of Google Chrome, and running the scripts you write to drive a load test. We call this Browser Level Load Testing.
- Quickstart
- 4. Run a real Load Test on Flood
- About
- Do more with Element
- Contributing
- Reporting Issues
- Authors
Install using NPM:
First, make sure you have installed the latest version of NodeJS for your platform.
# Using yarn
yarn global add element-cli
# Using npm
npm i -g element-cli
# Verify install
element --version
On macOS:
If you are on macOS and don't already have NodeJS installed, consider installing element
using homebrew.
brew install flood-io/taps/element
This will install element
along with anything else it needs to run, such as NodeJS.
# Using yarn
yarn global add element-cli@beta
# Using npm
npm i -g element-cli@beta
# Verify install
element --version
Using the element
command, you can generate a new project or generate a test within your existing project.
Generate a new project
element init ./my-element-project
This will create a new project an test.ts file with a single step stubbed out for you.
Or, generate a new file
element generate load-test-dashboard
This will create a new file with a single step stubbed out for you.
Edit test.ts
in your editor of choice. To learn more about the scripting capabilities we've put together a detailed tutorial on testing the "Flood Merchandise Store".
As you're writing your script, you can validate it by running it locally using element run
:
element run test.ts
This will run the script in an instance of Chrome and output the results locally.
For details of the available options see the element run
guide.
4. Run a real Load Test on Flood
Now that you have a test script, upload it to Flood as a new Stream and launch a Flood (a test).
Since Element version 1.3, you can launch a flood directly from Element CLI
Over the years, countless customers have mentioned that getting started with Load Testing is a daunting task. That's why it's often left until the last minute before launch. At Flood, it's our mission to make Load Testing less daunting and accessible to everyone. We want to give developers and testers an easy way to ensure that whatever part of the system they're responsible for meets expectations for both functionality and performance.
- Flood Element can be used to apply load to any web accessible application and measure how it performs as the load is ramped up.
- Measure performance regressions after deploys by integrating it with your CI/CD pipeline.
- Measure your application's response time from different regions as experienced by your customers.
- Create realistic load scenarios which stress test your network infrastructure without developing complex protocol level load test scripts.
Continue learning more Flood Element techniques by starting with our API documentation. The main entry point to all tests is the Browser class and a great place to get a feel for the capabilities of each test.
Visit https://element.flood.io to view the documentation.
Please see our CONTRIBUTING.md.
If you encounter any issues with the @flood/element
project or Flood Element product, please open an issue on the GitHub project.
If you're encountering issues with Flood itself, please contact Flood Support from within the Flood Dashboard, send us an email or ask our community.
- Ivan Vanderbyl (@ivanderbyl) – Flood
- Lachie Cox (@lachiecox) – Flood