# Your First Hurl File Throughout this tutorial, we'll walk through the creation of multiple Hurl files to test a basic quiz application. We'll show how to test this site locally, and how to automate these integration tests in a CI/CD chain like [GitHub Action] and [GitLab CI/CD]. The quiz application consists of: - a website that lets people create or play a series of quizzes - a set of REST APIs to list, create and delete question and quiz With Hurl, we're going to add tests for the website and the APIs. ## Prerequisites We’ll assume you have Hurl installed already. You can test it by running the following command in a shell prompt (indicated by the $ prefix): ```shell $ hurl --version ``` If Hurl is already installed, you should see the version of Hurl. If it isn't, you can check [Installation] to see how to install Hurl. Next, we’re going to install our quiz application locally, in order to test it. We are not going to build our application from scratch, in order to focus on how to test it. > Hurl being really language agnostic, you can use it to validate any type of application: in > this tutorial, our quiz application is built with [Spring Boot], > but this could as well be a [Node.js] or a [Flask] app. Our quiz application can be launched locally either: - using a Docker image - directly using the jar of the application If you want to use the Docker image, you must have Docker installed locally. If it is the case, just run in a shell: ```shell $ docker pull ghcr.io/jcamiel/quiz:latest $ docker run --name quiz --rm --detach --publish 8080:8080 ghcr.io/jcamiel/quiz:latest ``` And check that the container is running with: ```shell $ docker ps CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES 922d387923ec ghcr.io/jcamiel/quiz:latest "java -jar app/quiz.…" 8 seconds ago Up 6 seconds 0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp, :::8080->8080/tcp quiz ``` If you want to use the jar application, you must have Java installed locally. If it is the case, download the jar application from and run in a shell: ```shell $ java -jar quiz-0.0.2.jar ``` Either you're using the Docker images or the jar app, you can open a browser and test the quiz application by typing the URL :
Quiz home page Quiz home page
Our quiz app: we've only secured a budget for integration tests and nothing for the site design... ## A Basic Test Next, we’re going to write our first test. 1. Open a text editor and create a file named `basic.hurl`. In this file, just type the following text and save: ```hurl GET http://localhost:8080 ``` This is your first Hurl file, and probably one of the simplest. It consists of only one [entry]. > An entry has a mandatory [request specification]: in this case, we want to perform a > `GET` HTTP request on the endpoint . A request can be optionally followed by a [response > description], to add asserts on the HTTP response. For the moment, we don't have any response description. 2. In a shell, execute `hurl` with `basic.hurl` as argument: ```shell $ hurl basic.hurl Welcome to Quiz! .... ``` If the quiz app is running, you should see the content of the html file at . If the quiz app is not running, you'll see an error: ```shell $ hurl basic.hurl error: HTTP connection --> basic.hurl:1:5 |  1 | GET http://localhost:8080 | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (7) Failed to connect to localhost port 8080: Connection refused | ``` As there is no response description, this basic test only checks that an HTTP server is running at and responds with _something_. If the server had a problem on this endpoint, and had responded with a [`500 Internal Server Error`], Hurl would have just executed successfully the HTTP request, without checking the actual HTTP response. As this test is not sufficient to ensure that our server is alive and running, we're going to add some asserts on the response and, at least, check that the HTTP response status code is [`200 OK`]. 3. Open `basic.hurl` and modify it to test the status code response: ```hurl GET http://localhost:8080 HTTP/1.1 200 ``` 4. Execute `basic.hurl`: ```shell $ hurl basic.hurl Welcome to Quiz! .... ``` There is no modification to the output of Hurl, the content of the HTTP request is outputted to the terminal. But, now, we check that our server is responding with a `200 OK`. By default, Hurl behaves like [curl] and outputs the HTTP response. This is useful when you want to get data from a server, and you need to perform additional steps (like login, confirmation etc...) before being able to call your last request. In our case, we want to add tests to our project, so we can use [`--test`] command line option to have an adapted test output: 5. Execute `basic.hurl` in test mode: ```shell $ hurl --test basic.hurl basic.hurl: Running [1/1] basic.hurl: Success (1 request(s) in 8 ms) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Executed files: 1 Succeeded files: 1 (100.0%) Failed files: 0 (0.0%) Duration: 7 ms ``` 6. Modify `basic.hurl` to test a different HTTP response status code: ```hurl GET http://localhost:8080 HTTP/1.1 500 ``` 7. Save and execute it: ```shell $ hurl --test basic.hurl basic.hurl: Running [1/1] error: Assert status code --> basic.hurl:2:10 |  2 | HTTP/1.1 500 | ^^^ actual value is <200> | basic.hurl: Failure (1 request(s) in 8 ms) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Executed files: 1 Succeeded files: 0 (0.0%) Failed files: 1 (100.0%) Duration: 13 ms ``` 8. Revert your changes and finally add a comment at the beginning of the file: ```hurl # Our first Hurl file, just checking # that our server is up and running. GET http://localhost:8080 HTTP/1.1 200 ``` ## Recap That's it, this is your first Hurl file! This is really a basic test, but it shows how powerful Hurl's simple file format is. We're going to see in the next section how to improve our tests while keeping it really simple. [GitHub Action]: https://github.com/features/actions [GitLab CI/CD]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ [Installation]: /docs/installation.md [Spring Boot]: https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot [Node.js]: https://nodejs.org/en/ [Flask]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com [entry]: /docs/entry.md [request specification]: /docs/request.md [response description]: /docs/response.md [`500 Internal Server Error`]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/500 [`200 OK`]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/200 [`--test`]: /docs/manual.md#test [curl]: https://curl.se