What's Hurl?

Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format.

It can chain requests, capture values and evaluate queries on headers and body response. Hurl is very versatile: it can be used for both fetching data and testing HTTP sessions.

Hurl makes it easy to work with HTML content, REST / SOAP / GraphQL APIs, or any other XML / JSON based APIs.

# Get home:
GET https://example.org
HTTP 200
[Captures]
csrf_token: xpath "string(//meta[@name='_csrf_token']/@content)"


# Do login!
POST https://example.org/login?user=toto&password=1234
X-CSRF-TOKEN: {{csrf_token}}
HTTP 302

Chaining multiple requests is easy:

GET https://example.org/api/health
GET https://example.org/api/step1
GET https://example.org/api/step2
GET https://example.org/api/step3

Also an HTTP Test Tool

Hurl can run HTTP requests but can also be used to test HTTP responses. Different types of queries and predicates are supported, from XPath and JSONPath on body response, to assert on status code and response headers.

It is well adapted for REST / JSON APIs

POST https://example.org/api/tests
{
    "id": "4568",
    "evaluate": true
}
HTTP 200
[Asserts]
header "X-Frame-Options" == "SAMEORIGIN"
jsonpath "$.status" == "RUNNING"    # Check the status code
jsonpath "$.tests" count == 25      # Check the number of items
jsonpath "$.id" matches /\d{4}/     # Check the format of the id

HTML content

GET https://example.org
HTTP 200
[Asserts]
xpath "normalize-space(//head/title)" == "Hello world!"

GraphQL

POST https://example.org/graphql
```graphql
{
  human(id: "1000") {
    name
    height(unit: FOOT)
  }
}
```
HTTP 200

and even SOAP APIs

POST https://example.org/InStock
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
SOAPAction: "http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"


  
  
    
      GOOG
    
  

HTTP 200

Hurl can also be used to test the performance of HTTP endpoints

GET https://example.org/api/v1/pets
HTTP 200
[Asserts]
duration < 1000  # Duration in ms

And check response bytes

GET https://example.org/data.tar.gz
HTTP 200
[Asserts]
sha256 == hex,039058c6f2c0cb492c533b0a4d14ef77cc0f78abccced5287d84a1a2011cfb81;

Finally, Hurl is easy to integrate in CI/CD, with text, JUnit, TAP and HTML reports

Why Hurl?

• Text Format: for both devops and developers
• Fast CLI: a command line for local dev and continuous integration
• Single Binary: easy to install, with no runtime required

Powered by curl

Hurl is a lightweight binary written in Rust. Under the hood, Hurl HTTP engine is powered by libcurl, one of the most powerful and reliable file transfer libraries. With its text file format, Hurl adds syntactic sugar to run and test HTTP requests, but it's still the curl that we love: fast, efficient and IPv6 / HTTP/3 ready.

Feedbacks

To support its development, star Hurl on GitHub!

Feedback, suggestion, bugs or improvements are welcome.

POST https://hurl.dev/api/feedback
{
  "name": "John Doe",
  "feedback": "Hurl is awesome!"
}
HTTP 200

Resources

License

Blog

Tutorial

Documentation (download HTML, PDF, Markdown)

GitHub

Table of Contents

Samples

To run a sample, edit a file with the sample content, and run Hurl:

$ vi sample.hurl

GET https://example.org

$ hurl sample.hurl

By default, Hurl behaves like curl and outputs the last HTTP response's entry. To have a test oriented output, you can use --test option:

$ hurl --test sample.hurl

A particular response can be saved with [Options] section:

GET https://example.ord/cats/123
[Options]
output: cat123.txt    # use - to output to stdout
HTTP 200

GET https://example.ord/dogs/567
HTTP 200

Finally, Hurl can take files as input, or directories. In the latter case, Hurl will search files with .hurl extension recursively.

$ hurl --test integration/*.hurl
$ hurl --test .

You can check Hurl tests suite for more samples.

Getting Data

A simple GET:

GET https://example.org

Requests can be chained:

GET https://example.org/a
GET https://example.org/b
HEAD https://example.org/c
GET https://example.org/c

Doc

HTTP Headers