Loadtest web service with k6

Donald Le

Nov 27, 2020·2 min read

First install k6 in your system. We will go for Linux (Ubuntu).

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 379CE192D401AB61echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/loadimpact/deb stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.listsudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install k6

Open any IDE for writing test code. We will use WebStorm. To enable code suggestion for k6, install this library with npm:

$ npm init --yes# install the k6 types as dev dependency$ npm install --save-dev @types/k6

For showing visual chart while the test is running, we have some of the methods:

• Amazon CloudWatch
• Apache Kafka
• InfluxDB + Grafana
• Cloud
• CSV
• Data Dog

We will use InfluxDB and Grafana for visualization.

Install InfluxDB with Docker

docker run -p 8086:8086 \
      -v $PWD:/var/lib/influxdb \
      influxdb

Install Grafana as service in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install -y adduser libfontconfig1
wget https://dl.grafana.com/oss/release/grafana_7.3.4_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i grafana_7.3.4_amd64.deb

Example code to run

Here we run the test with GraphQL API, set the virtual user for running as:

export let options = {

    vus: 1000,

    duration: '300s',

};

Run the test and we will see the dashboard on grafana:

k6 run --insecure-skip-tls-verify --out influxdb=http://localhost:8086/k6db script.js

(Skip tls security

--insecure-skip-tls-verify

)

Hope it helps.

~~PEACE~~