Speedboat

Speedboat is the codename for the next generation of Load Impact's load generator.

Getting started

Using Docker

Speedboat is available as a public Docker container for instant execution:

docker run loadimpact/speedboat http://example.com
docker run -v $PWD/script.js:/script.js:ro loadimpact/speedboat /script.js

Compiling from Go source

You can also download and compile the sources:

go get github.com/loadimpact/speedboat

Requires a working Go environment, version 1.6 or later. Will place the speedboat binary in $GOPATH/bin so you need to have that in your $PATH.

Usage

# Run a test against a URL
speedboat http://example.com/

# Run a script
speedboat myscript.js

# Run with 50 VUs for 30 seconds
speedboat -u 50 -d 30s http://example.com/

For Go beginners - how to set up Go

If you have never worked with Go before, you'll have to follow some steps to get a dev environment going.

This is a tl;dr version of "How to Write Go Code" from the official documentation - a highly recommended read if you'd like to get more acquainted with these things.

Quick Installation

1. Install Go 1.6 or later

   On OSX, you can use Homebrew:

   brew install golang
   

   On Ubuntu 16.04 or later, you can use the official package:

   sudo apt-get install golang
   

   On older Ubuntu systems, there's the Ubuntu Containers Team's PPA:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/lxd-stable
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install golang
   

2. Create a Go Workspace

   Just make an empty directory, anywhere you like. This will hold all your Go code. Yes, all of it. See below for an explanation.

   mkdir $HOME/go
   

   Then export an environment variable called GOPATH to point to it, and add $GOPATH/bin to your $PATH.

   export GOPATH=$HOME/go
   export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
   

   I'd recommend putting this in your .profile or similar.

Understanding $GOPATH

Unlike most languages, Go has strong opinions on how your sources should be structured. Rather than having each project in its own, isolated workspace, you have a single workspace for all your Go code.

It looks something like this:

src/
   github.com/
       loadimpact/
           speedboat/
               # ...sources...
bin/
   speedboat

This is because Go doesn't have a separate package manager, like pip or npm - instead, package names are repo URLs.

The go get command then scans your code for imports, and recursively grabs dependencies using these URLs. In other words, package management is built into the language itself!