# Your First Hurl File Throughout this tutorial, we'll walk through the creation of multiple Hurl files to test a basic web application about movies called _Movies Box_. 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]. Our Movies Box website consists of: - a website that lets people make list of favorite movies - a set of REST APIs to search movies, add, remove favorites 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 movies application locally, in order 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 [Express], a [Node.js] framework, > but this could as well be a [Spring Boot] or a [Flask] app. Our movies application can be launched locally either: - using a Docker image - using Node 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/hurl-express-tutorial:latest $ docker run --name movies --rm --detach --publish 3000:3000 ghcr.io/jcamiel/hurl-express-tutorial:latest ``` And check that the container is running with: ```shell $ docker ps CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES 4002ce42e507 ghcr.io/jcamiel/hurl-express-tutorial:latest "node dist/bin/www.js" 3 seconds ago Up 2 seconds 0.0.0.0:3000->3000/tcp, :::3000->3000/tcp movies ``` If you want to launch the Node application, you must have Node installed locally. ```shell $ git clone https://github.com/jcamiel/hurl-express-tutorial.git && cd hurl-express-tutorial $ npm install $ npm start ``` Either you're using the Docker images or the Node app, you can open a browser and test the website by typing the URL :
Movies Box home page Movies Box home page
Play a little with the site. You can see details of each movie, search for movies (try "1982"), login to add favorites (use username `fab` and password `12345678`). ## 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:3000 ``` 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 Movies Box .... ``` If the Movies Box website is running, you should see the content of the HTML file at . If the website is not running, you'll see an error: ```shell $ hurl basic.hurl error: HTTP connection --> basic.hurl:1:5 |  1 | GET http://localhost:3000 | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (7) Failed to connect to localhost port 3000 after 6 ms: Couldn't connect to server | ``` 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:3000 HTTP 200 ``` 4. Execute `basic.hurl`: ```shell $ hurl basic.hurl Movies Box .... ``` 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 25 ms) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Executed files: 1 Succeeded files: 1 (100.0%) Failed files: 0 (0.0%) Duration: 27 ms ``` 6. Modify `basic.hurl` to test a different HTTP response status code: ```hurl GET http://localhost:3000 HTTP 500 ``` 7. Save and execute it: ```shell $ hurl --test basic.hurl basic.hurl: Running [1/1] error: Assert status code --> basic.hurl:2:6 |  2 | HTTP 500 | ^^^ actual value is <200> | basic.hurl: Failure (1 request(s) in 20 ms) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Executed files: 1 Succeeded files: 0 (0.0%) Failed files: 1 (100.0%) Duration: 21 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:3000 HTTP 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 [Express]: https://expressjs.com